Item1318: Rename "Main"-Web in "User" and create new "Home"-Web

One of our customers renamed the Main-web and ended up in big trouble yesterday. I have the following suggestions to improve the software and prevent such errors:

1. We should rename the Main-Web in "User"-Web and create a new "Main-Wiki"-Web, that contains nothing but content, that can also be deleted or renamed. Maybe "Home"-Web would be suitable.
2. Wie should warn Administrators before renaming or deleting important webs like "Main" or "System" or "TWiki" and explain, why it is not a good idea to change them.

Any comments? What do you think?

-- MartinSeibert - 18 Mar 2009

This fits in the easy-upgrade path we are working on for release 1.1.

-- ArthurClemens - 18 Mar 2009

Renaming the Main web to User web comes up regularly. And always people forget the existing users. People have used the Main. prefix 1000s of places. Probably 100000s of places. Hardcoded as Main. Upgrading if we suddenly change the webname to User will become a night mare. Unless you have a good solution to that problem I will resist. My guess is that more than 90% of users installing any Foswiki version are upgraders. The upgrading path must be easy and painless and just renaming the Main to User will create problems.

And the other half of the proposed solution is also problematic. Calling a web Home for a homepage for the site is very obvious and I am sure many have a Home web already. I can tell you that Motorola has a Home web already. And I would explode in anger if I installed an upgrade package and found my Home web replaced by a default Home web where I would have to restore my Home.WebHOme and Home.WebPreferences and other topics from a backup.

It is not that I do not want to do something about it. But there is no simple solution like renaming a web.

This is a radical proposal that needs to go through the release process. So I no action this as there is no simple action people can check-in on this bug item.

It requires a series of actions and implementations that need to go from proposals and discussions into individual Items.

This one will just stay open forever and be ignored.

-- KennethLavrsen - 18 Mar 2009