PublishContrib

Generates a static view of a web in the following ways: (options depend on configuration)

• HTML files in a directory
• a zip archive file
• a tgz archive file
• a PDF
• HTML files uploaded directly to an FTP server

Previously known as GenHTMLAddOn, and then PublishAddOn, this is the original publishing extension for TWiki.

PublishContrib provides support for the generation of stand-alone HTML from a TWiki web. It will generate fully rendered versions of a set of TWiki pages together with any attached files.

When TWiki generates a view, it does so dynamically i.e. there's a CGI script that runs, processes some files, and generates HTML that is displayed by the browser. There are circumstances in which this may not be desirable or even possible. For example:

1. TWiki is used to create documentation which has to be bundled into a product release
2. Published versions of TWiki pages must be read-only
3. The TWiki server is inaccessible to the audience (e.g. on the other side of a corporate firewall)

Features

• All standard TWiki tags are interpreted
• Plugins are called
• Unresolved links to non-existent topics are silently ignored
• Topic links internal to the TWiki are translated to relative links
• Powerful support for choosing what content gets published
• Any links to the 'pub' areas of topics in the web are automatically resolved and the referenced files copied
• Any links to images outside the TWiki are resolved, and the image is stored in the output (requires LWP)
• Output in HTML or PDF. HTML can be compressed in different archive formats.
• Full support for hierarchical webs
• Multiple instances (e.g. dev, test, prod) can be specified
• Special output format specific templates (such as viewpdf) can be used
• Able to publish HTML and referenced files directly to a remote server via ftp * Complete history of what was published, and when!

Usage

Publish Form

The easiest way to publish a web is from this topic, by filling in the following form.

The output is generated in a directory designated during installation. The progress messages printed during documentation generation tell you exactly where the output is, and you can use the publishers control interface to manage your published output.

Publishing is a controlled process; before you can publish, you have to have VIEW access to the topics you want to publish, and CHANGE access to the publishing history topic.

You can also create a permanent topic in a web to help with the publishing process.

Wildcard Patterns

Wildcard patterns are well known to people who are used to command lines on computers, but may be unfamiliar to the Windows generation. A wildcard is a special string that you can put into a filename so that it matches a whole range of files:

String	What it does	Example	What the example matches
*	Matches any string, including an empty string.	*Cheese*	Every topic with "Cheese" somewhere in the name (but not "cheese")
?	Matches any single character.	Example1?	Example10 and Example 1X but not example1
[...]	Matches any one of the enclosed characters. A pair of characters separated by a hyphen denotes a range expression; any character that sorts between those two characters, inclusive, using the current locale's collating sequence and character set, is matched. If the first character following the [ is a ^ then any character not enclosed is matched. A - may be matched by including it as the first or last character in the set. A ] may be matched by including it as the first character in the set. Within [ and ], character classes can be specified using the syntax [:class:], where class is one of the following classes defined in the POSIX.2 standard: alnum, alpha, ascii, blank, cntrl, digit, graph, lower, print, punct, space, upper, word, xdigit. A character class matches any character belonging to that class. The word character class matches letters, digits, and the character _.	B[aeiou]g	Bag, Bog, Big, Beg, Bug

Specifying topic order

You may want to specify the order of topics in a published file. You can do it by putting inclusion pattern lists separated by semicolon. Let's say you specify the following as inclusion pattern:

Abc*,Def*;Ghi*

Then, topics starting with Abc or Def are put into the output first. Next, topics starting with Def are put into the output.

More than one pattern lists may match a topic. Even in that case, a topic isn't included more than once in an output. For example, the following pattern yields an output having topics starting with Abcd first, then topics starting with Ab but not Abcd because topics starting with Abcd are already included.

Abcd*;Ab*

Regular Expressions

A perl regular expression. You can use a simple string here, which will be matched exactly, or you can read up on perl regular expressions on the web.

Using a Publish Topic (configtopic)

You can create a publish topic in a web that contains all the details needed to publish that web. This is just a topic with a series of standard TWiki variable settings (which correspond to the form parameters) in it. You can use the PublishWeb topic in this web as a template for your own topics.

Alternatively you can just take a copy of the form in this topic, paste it into your own topic, and change the defaults.

To use a publish topic, you must pass the configtopic parameter to the publish script set to the name of the topic to use to control publishing. You can specify a topic in another web using the standard Web.Topic syntax.

Publishing from the command line

This is only for TWiki administrators. Not for ordinary users.

TWiki scripts work as part of the web application while can run from command line. The publish script is no exception. If you have necessary permission, just cd to the bin directory, and ./publish. Parameters are passed as name=value pairs, for example:

./publish web=Book exclusions='Web*' format=file
./publish web=Book inclusions=WebBook format=pdf genopt='--book --duplex --toclevels=5'

The available parameter names are shown in the example above, in the 'Name' column.

Controlling which parts of a topic get published

You can control what gets published from a topic using %STARTPUBLISH% and %STOPPUBLISH% control tags:

• If %STARTPUBLISH% is the first control tag seen in the file, everything before it will be ignored.
• Everything between %STOPPUBLISH% and the next %STARTPUBLISH% (or the end of the topic) will be ignored.
• %STARTPUBLISH% and %STOPPUBLISH% will be visible in the viewed topic, so you can easily see what will be published from the topic.

Note: the old <nopublish> tag is deprecated and should be replaced in topics

Another good trick is to set up a special "publishing" web. Create topics in the web that %INCLUDE the topics from other webs that you want to publish. You can use STARTSECTION and ENDSECTION to highlight what you want published. This way the "publishing" web gives you a view of exactly what will be in the published output, without the need for special publishing tags.

Publishing History

Every time a web is published, then the results of that publishing step are stored in a topic in the web. By default this topic is called PublishContribHistory, but you can choose another name (see the form, above). In order to publish a web, you have to be able to write to this topic. If you need to add access controls to the topic, then make sure you do that right at the beginning of the topic, or in the hidden preferences.

The history topics contains a list of all the parameters used, and the versions of the topics that were published, so it is very useful for tracking exactly what you publish. it is written every time you run publish.

Links to other webs

You may wonder how inter web links are handled. Here's how.

Let's say you are publishing WebA and TopicA has a link to WebB.TopicB. Then, on the published page, the link is transformed into

<a href="../WebB/TopicB">...</a>

This means that you can make a link from WebA.TopicA to WebB.TopicB work on published files with the following steps.

1. Publish WebA and WebB to zip files
2. Unzip WebA.zip in the WebA folder -- if you do the operation on Windows, that's the default behavior.
3. unzip WebB.zip in the WebB folder so that the folders WebA and WebB are in the same directory.

Installation Instructions

Dependencies

Note: If you want to generate PDF files, you will need an installation of htmldoc. This program is available from http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/ for free, but you are strongly recommended to buy the commercial version. Your support for open-source projects helps make open-source software possible.

• For an automated installation, run the configure script and follow "Find More Extensions" in the in the Extensions section.
  • See the installation supplement on TWiki.org for more information.

• Or, follow these manual installation steps:
  • Download the ZIP file from the extension home on twiki.org (see below).
  • Unzip PublishContrib.zip in your twiki installation directory.
  • Set the ownership of the extracted directories and files to the webserver user.
  • Install the dependencies (if any).

Run configure and complete the installation in the PublishContrib section. If you can't do this for some reason, these are the settings required in LocalSite.cfg:

$TWiki::cfg{PublishContrib}{Dir}	File path to the directory where published files will be generated. you will normally want this to be visible via a URL, so the TWiki pub directory is a good choice.
$TWiki::cfg{PublishContrib}{URL}	URL path of the directory you defined above.
$TWiki::cfg{PublishContrib}{ViewUrlBaseRegex}	Links to other topics may be written in absolute URLs, which is not a good practice but some do anyway. There might be URLs not matching the TWiki::getScriptURL('view') value but still work. If you set a regular expression matching such URLs, links having those URLs are properly handled. e.g. http://twiki(?:-\w+)?.example.com
$TWiki::cfg{PublishContrib}{FormatAllowed}{file}	There are several output formats supported by this contrib. Depending on your situation, you provided some formats, while not providing the others. By setting true (typically 1) or false (typically 0) for these variables, you sepecify which formats are provided and which are not.
$TWiki::cfg{PublishContrib}{FormatAllowed}{zip}
$TWiki::cfg{PublishContrib}{FormatAllowed}{tgz}
$TWiki::cfg{PublishContrib}{FormatAllowed}{pdf}
$TWiki::cfg{PublishContrib}{FormatAllowed}{ftp}
$TWiki::cfg{PublishContrib}{PDFCmd}	Template command-line for the PDF generator program - for example, htmldoc --webpage --links --linkstyle plain --outfile %FILE|F% %EXTRAS|U% %FILES|F%'
$TWiki::cfg{PublishContrib}{PluginControl}	This contrib has a feature to disable TWiki plugins when publishing. But the feature is harmful for Fast CGI and mod_perl. Setting a true value (typically 1) to this turns of the feature.

PDF output

1. install htmldoc from http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/

Note that htmldoc can also be used to generate PostScript by using the -t option in the Other output generator options above. See the htmldoc man pages for details.

.tgz (tar) output

1. Install Archive::Tar and everything it depends on

.zip output

1. Install Archive::Zip and everything it depends on

Plugin Info

This add-on started as the TWiki:Plugins/GenHTMLAddon, written by TWiki:Main/CrawfordCurrie at Motorola. It was then rewritten by TWiki:Main/EricScouten, and then fixed and enhanced by TWiki:Main/CrawfordCurrie (http://c-dot.co.uk). It has been further extended by TWiki:Main/SvenDowideit and TWiki:Main/MartinCleaver.

Plugin Authors:	TWiki:Main/CrawfordCurrie, TWiki:Main/EricScouten, TWiki:Main.SvenDowideit, TWiki:Main.MartinCleaver
Copyright:	© 2001 Motorola © 2002-2003, Eric Scouten © 2004-2006 Crawford Currie http://c-dot.co.uk © 2006 Martin Cleaver http://www.cleaver.org © 2008-2017, TWiki:TWiki.TWikiContributor
Sponsors:	Wind River Systems for the 2005 functionality improvements Sabio Labs for the pdf and tgz output formats
License:	GPL (GNU General Public License)
Contrib Version:	2017-05-18

Dependencies:	Name Version Description File::Spec >0 Required. Used to analyse URL paths. File::Copy >0 Required. Used to move files around. File::Path >0 Required to manipulate directories. File::Temp >0 Required for temporary files. LWP >0 Optional. Used to include images referenced by absolute URLs Archive::Zip >=0 Optional. Required to generate .zip output Archive::Tar >=0 Optional. Required to generate .tgz output Net::FTP >0 Optional. Required for ftp publishing. htmldoc Optional. Required to generate .pdf output Digest::MD5 >0 Optional. Required for fast upload to ftp servers.
Contrib Home:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/PublishContrib
Feedback:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/PublishContribDev
Appraisal:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/PublishContribAppraisal

Related Topics: TWikiPreferences, TWikiPlugins