Re: [xwiki-users] Improving doc for beginners (was Re: Have error when install XWIKI v3)

On 03/20/2011 02:04 PM, 许凌志 wrote: Strange, I always say how easy it is to setup XWiki compared to most other PHP applications. It depends on what's your starting point and what do you want to do. Setting up XWiki for complete beginners is much easier than setting up a PHP application for complete beginners. XWiki has an .exe that brings in everything, or it has a .zip that can be unpacked on a portable USB drive. Other than a working JVM, there's no need for advanced setup. On the other hand, PHP applications expect an already configured working LAMP/WAMP environment, and once you manage to get that working, and you unpack the application in /var/www/, it is easy to finish the configuration. Sure, now it's easy to get a working LAMP machine in a few minutes, if you're an advanced user, but for a non-tech windows user just wanting to try this thing, "the droo pal or what's it called", how do you explain setting up PHP on top of Apache HTTPD, and that's just so that you can begin installing Drupal. There are two distinct phases here, the installation and the configuration. XWiki, as most java web applications, is easy to install, but we're lacking on the first-run configuration part. We're aware of this, and we'll try to improve it. However, this is not the top priority feature that we should work on, since: - the initial setup is done once, by one person, so features that will be used by every user every day take priority over features that are used once by one user - for a very quick setup, we do provide the standalone packages The initial setup has been bugging me as well, and I'd like to see that part improved, but the fastest way to see it implemented is to get patches from contributors. Now, coming to your specific problem, I'm not sure it's really a valid point. Installing the right database connector is not something that should be done by the application itself in a first-run wizard. If it were able to do that it would actually signal a bad system setup, security-wise. It's a good rule not to allow web applications read-write access to the machine it's sitting on. PHP applications don't have this problem since PHP already offers the needed connectors. We could overcome this by packaging a bunch of connectors by default, it would be only a slight increase in size and in required memory. But I'm not so sure about that, currently I'm -0 for this idea. And frankly, I don't understand why would you download the 3.x version when 5.x is available. You're not the first one to do this, it's quite often, so there could be a good reason. Did you intentionally use 3.x? Did you reach that version from someplace else where 5.x wasn't listed? Was it already there somehow? -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/