Adding a config variable

Fear featurism! Think twice if this is a generally needed switch or whether it's only needed by you personally. Every new config switch adds a little overhead to every request, and generally makes things more complicated.

Then follow these steps:

1. Add a default value of your variable to MoinMoin.config.multiconfig; in most cases, this should be a false value (i.e. one of None, [], {}, "") which triggers the old behaviour of the software, before you added your extension.

2. Add the code that supports the new variable, often in the form if request.cfg.myvar: do_my_new_thing().

3. Maybe create a help page about the new feature.

Hints for automatic generation of pages

Moin can be used as a web application development framework and if your application needs to generate new pages, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• use PageEditor and saveText to make new pages

• since 1.1 there are new keyword parameters do_editor_backup and do_revision_backup - both defaulting to 1. Set them to 0 if you recreate pages often (like refreshing a web app status page once every few seconds) or your backup directory will be flooded with old version backups and editor backups.

• if you need to automatically put ACLs on such a page, make sure that request.user has the right (admin) to do that. If your current user has not, but you need to do it nevertheless, then make a new request object using a more privileged SystemUser (make an account for it and give it more rights per acl_before) and give that request object the calls dealing with the new page.