wikisvn handles subversive activities on your computer. No, it does not involve terrorism.

Subversion is a very powerful (possibly the best) version control software. It is available here: http://subversion.tigris.org But we'll not use that. A popular GUI version of Subversion for windows is available at http://www.tortoisesvn.net and wikisvn is based on that.

We've written a wrapper for TortoiseSVN that will allow the use of SVN on any website. Once you install our utility, you can use a special link on your websites and handle many file-management and version control activities.

BTW, Wikis are just one type of websites. You could use wikisvn on other types of websites too. It is all upto you.

It is hugely useful for a group of people working together in an organization... but it could also be used by individuals who are methodical regarding organizing their work.

Installation

TortoiseSVN MUST be separately installed; either before or after installing wikisvn.

The wikisvn MUST be installed on the user's computer using the supplied installer. Manually copying the executable would not work at all. This is because the browsers on the user's computer must be made receptive to the new URL schemes. Once installed, the special sv: links will do its work in Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer. The first time you use it in most of these browsers; a warning will be displayed. Usually you would get a checkbox so that the warning is not displayed next time onwards.

During installation, setup your working folder (even if it is not created) from within the installer.

Ok. Now we are on!

The sv: scheme

Ensure that your Wiki (or website or intranet or whatever that works in your browser) accepts sv: as a link. I use wikisvn, to manage stuff on pmWiki based web sites. pmWiki can be finely configured, and one of the things that it can do is to automagically create SVN links as per the page being visited. For e.g. the $Group page variable can be used to form a wikisvn link.

You should configure the pmWiki installation to accept the sv: scheme. It is very simple and explained here: http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/AddUrlSchemes Other CMS (Content Managment Systems) and wikis should have their own method.

The commandline version of TortoiseSVN is called TortoiseProc and it will happily pop up TortoiseSVN dialogs as required. The sv: Url scheme mimics TortoiseProc quite literally. If you were to use Tortoiseproc on your Windows console, you would give commands such as:

tortoiseproc /command:about

In the above example the About dialog would pop up. In order to convert the above to an sv: link, we'll simply strip off tortoiseproc /command: from the above and specify the rest. (See example below)

Read the TorotoiseSVN's built in help on "Automating TortoiseSVN" and you will get the entire list of commands supported by TortoiseProc.

Or better still, read it online here: http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-automation.html#tsvn-automation-basics

You can use the sv: link for whatever commands that TortoiseProc accepts on the command line. The only difference is that the /path parameter would be silently inserted by wikisvn based on what you had supplied during wikisvn's installation. But if you do give the /path parameter in the sv: link then wikisvn will assume it is a relative path beneath the path that was set during the installation of wikisvn and it will get appended to the one given by you in the sv: link.

Raison d'etre

We expect wikiSVN to be used by people working together in groups. It would be reasonable to expect that each person in the group would set his/her own working folder. The sv: links in the wiki would allow all Subversion activities to take place without assuming a predetermined working folder on every person's computer.

Talking of which ... I wonder why the people who wrote TortoiseSVN did not give the features of wikiSVN in their utility. The reason I am asking is that they did implement an svn: url scheme but all that did was browse a remote subversion repository. You can try this yourself: If you give svn://http://someRemoteRepository in a browser address bar it will open up a tree browser for the specified remote repository.

Configuration

There is only one configuration file, which has just two pieces of information (in this version). It is written in a file named wikisvn.ini and it is placed in the user's My Documents folder at the time of installation. The "Dir" value in that ini points to the working folder and "Expl" value tells wikisvn which program/command to use for exploring local files. You can change these any time.

Oh, you should specify that folder during installation else the installer will not proceed. It is not necessary for the SVN working to exist during the time of installation. But you must ensure that it does exist at the time of usage.

Examples

Once you install wikiSVN and follow all the above instructions ... then ...

1. clicking on this link:

sv://about

will pop up the TortoiseSVN's about dialog

2. sv://help will give you TortoiseSVN's help

3. sv://commit will start the commit dialog on the working folder that you had set for wikiSVN

4. sv://commit /path:xyz will start the commit dialog for the xyz folder within the working folder

... etc

If the path fragment you specify after /path: contains sub-folders, then separate them using FRONTSLASH (/) and not the usual Windows backslash.

There is one EXTRA command that is not part of TortoiseSVN

The following sv: link

sv://explore

will yield the current working folder in an explorer window. If you give one more parameter after that, it is treated as a sub-folder within the working folder and the explorer window would open at that location.

If you do not like the default Windows explorer as your file manager, install any of the zillion file-managers out there and give the path to the executable in the wikisvn.ini file.

Error messages

As all wikisvn does is route commands to Tortoiseproc, you will get the same dialogs/error messages that TortoiseSVN gives. There is particularly an interesting one which pops up saying this: "No error occured". Thank you. I need to ask someone about it. It a is deep and zen like message. (There is another pop up which simply contains nothing... the ultimate in Nirvana) All I can say is that don't worry about these dialogs. They dont harm your system.

License

GPL.2.0 The code for this is actually very small and it is written in AutoIt (http://www.autoitscript.com/ ) Here is the code for wikisvn Please let me know your thoughts on our Facebook group.

Download

wikisvnsetup.exe

Enjoy. If you really enjoy this, please consider a small donation at our main site http://www.sabufrancis.com

Chief Honcho

Sabu Francis July 4, 2007

See also:
subversion, TortoiseSVN, sv:, version control