ReadMe for Dev-Editor 3.0 (CVS)
===============================

Description
-----------

Dev-Editor is a simple CGI based editor written in Perl and licensed under the
terms of the Artistic License, which allows remote changes to files and
directory structures on a web server. That's useful if you aren't able to access
the files on your homepage directly, for example if you are on holiday.

Installation
------------

First, you have to copy the files into a directory on your web server where you
are able to execute scripts (in most cases, this is "cgi-bin"). I suggest to
create a sub directory for Dev-Editor.
Then, you have to change the first line of devedit.pl: Just replace
/usr/bin/perl by the path to your Perl interpreter.
If you are on a UNIX based system, you have to set devedit.pl as executable
(chmod 755 in most cases).
You will also need to configure Dev-Editor. See the next section for details.

Note, that the directory where you installed Dev-Editor should be protected by
HTTP Authentication. If you don't do that, everybody will be able to access
Dev-Editor and use it for evil purposes.

Configuration
-------------

Open the file devedit.conf. This file contains keys and values separated by a
"=" sign. Lines beginning with a "#" sign are ignored.
Here is a list of the configuration options currently available:

Option                   Description
------                   -----------

fileroot                 The root directory Dev-Editor is allowed to access.
                         Nobody is allowed to access the files and directories
                         above this directory. Dev-Editor needs write access to
                         this directory and to the sub directories.

httproot                 This is the equivalent HTTP URL to the root directory.
                         It's just used for visual output, so it doesn't need to
                         be correct.

max_file_size            Here you may define a maximum size for files (Bytes).
                         If the user wants to view or edit a file larger than
                         this defined size, Dev-Editor denies file access (but
                         the file can still be copied, renamed or removed).
                         If this is empty or 0, any file can be viewed or
                         edited.

timeformat               The format of the time shown in directory listings.
                         These are the most important placeholders:

                         %a - short day name (Sun to Sat)
                         %A - long day name (Sunday to Saturday)
                         %b - short month name (Jan to Dec)
                         %B - long month name (January to December)
                         %d - day of the month (01 to 31)
                         %H - hour in 24 hour clock (00 to 23)
                         %I - hour in 12 hour clock (01 to 12)
                         %m - month of the year (01 to 12)
                         %M - minutes (00 to 59)
                         %p - AM or PM
                         %S - seconds (00 to 59)
                         %y - two digit year (03)
                         %Y - four digit year (2003)
                         %% - percent sign

                         There are a lot of other placeholders. A complete list
                         is found at:
                         http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/strftime.html
                         Note that some systems don't support some of the
                         placeholders (for example %T on Windows).

                         This format is also used to format the system time in
                         the About dialogue.

use_gmt                  Set this option to 1 if you want to use Greenwich Mean
                         Time (GMT/UTC) in directory listing and in the About
                         dialogue instead of the local time.

forbidden                Specify a list of filenames the user is not allowed to
                         access. The filenames have to be relative to the
                         virtual root directory (they must also begin with a
                         slash) and have to be separated by space characters. If
                         a filename contains space characters, you have to put
                         it into double quotation marks ("/filename").

error_file               The path to the file which defines the error messages.
                         The file has the same format as this one.

template_file            The path to the file which defines the paths to the
                         template files. The file has the same format as this
                         one.

Notes
-----

Symbolic links are treated as files, no matter where they point to. The user is
just allowed to see the path where the link points to, he is allowed to delete
the link, to rename it and to overwrite it by renaming an other file. Nothing
else is allowed.
Accessing a symbolic link pointing to a directory also caused a very strange
effect: It was possible to access this directory, but you could not access the
objects in it.
I had to do it in this way because of the very stupid behaviour of abs_path()
from the Cwd module: This function is just able to detect the absolute path of
directories.
Hard links are not affected by this.

------------------------------------------------

(C) 1999-2000 Roland Bluethgen, Frank Schoenmann
(C) 2003-2005 Patrick Canterino

E-Mail: patrick@patshaping.de
WWW:    http://devedit.sourceforge.net/