Notes on TWiki installation using my PowerWeb account from Strato:

• The right version of perl was at /usr/bin/perl58 on my server
• Perl CGI scripts must have a .pl extension in the cgi-bin directory
• Had to remove the -T flag from all scripts (when executing them on the Strato server, perl complains it is "too late" to apply the flag)
• The Strato servers do not provide RCS, so I had to use RcsLite mode
• .htpasswd and .htaccess files seem to work OK. However, I had to remove the first SetHandler blabla rule in .htaccess before anything worked at all.
• egrep does not seem to be available on my server. Therefore, I could not get regular expression searches to work. See also TWiki:Support/HowToReplaceEgrepSearch. I am now using a perl script egrep.pl which emulates part of the egrep functionality; hopefully enough to keep TWiki working.
• "Changes" in Main.WebLeftBar did not work since it referred to cgi-bin/changes rather than cgi-bin/changes.pl
• http://www.clausbrod.de/info.php lists interesting system stats
• Change notifications via email did not work. Stato does not provide cron support in the package I'm using, and I think TWiki requires a crontab entry for this. See TWiki:Support/MailNotifyWithoutCron and TWiki:Codev/MailNotifyCgiScript for a potential solution. For the time being, I installed http://www.clausbrod.de/cgi-bin/notify.pl which can be run from the browser. Also, I registered for an account at http://www.cron-server.de, and they are now running a daily cron job for me every day.
• We also seem to have problems finding backlinks.
• Performance wasn't all that great, really. Now testing TWiki:Plugins/CacheAddOn, which improves things a LOT, but introduces a few update glitches; see TWiki:Plugins/CacheAddOnDev. Could also try SelfLoader (TWiki:Codev/ModuleLoadingPerformanceEnhancements).
• Made TWiki more search-engine friendly:
  • Support for variable TOPICTITLE which can set within the topic
  • Improved page layout so that search engines see the body text first (well, almost) rather than lengthy CSS code
• Could not get short URLs to work fully, only an approximation - see http://www.clausbrod.de/Blog/BlogOnSoftware20041229

To do:

• Improve homepage protection (see TWiki:Support/UsingVariablesWithAccessControl)
• Find permanent solution for cronjobs
• Add TWiki:Plugins/CounterPlugin
• Site needs to become even more search engine friendly (set the right meta tags per topic)