Where does TWiki store articles: in the file system or in the MySQL database?

Question

I have a dump of the directory structure from an old TWiki website from around 2010 that is no longer up. I would like to view the raw text of the articles but am unable to locate any files that appear to be articles after browsing the directory structure. Where does TWiki store user articles in the file system? I found lib/articles/artlib.php and lib/articles/index.php, but nothing appeared to be user added in there. Perhaps there were no articles, if so, how can I confirm that?

Alternatively, are the articles stored in the MySQL database and not stored as textual files? If in the db, is there an easy way to browse them? I'd rather not create a complete TWiki site and try to map these old file system into it only to discover that there was no useful content, so how can I judge how much content was actually added? Thus far, I've found one image file in temp/CRW_0075.jpg that was added to the site, but that is the only sign of content I've located thus far.

My ultimate goal here is to assess if there is any useful information in this TWiki and if so, to extract it into a private MediaWiki I am helping to create.

Answer 1

TWiki stores content directly in the file system. Look for twiki/data and twiki/pub directories.

The twiki/data has directories representing TWiki webs (workspaces). Those webs contain files representing the wiki page data. There is a .txt file with page content, and a .txt,v file with page history. For example, page SlicedBread in the Eng web will be at twiki/data/Eng/SlicedBrad.txt. The .txt file is text, but has also meta data for the structured content. A TWiki Form attached to a page represents a database record (key-value pairs). If you want to convert content to another wiki you can use the unstructured wiki content and ignore the structured part (with some loss of information).

The twiki/pub has directories representing TWiki webs, which has a directory for each page that has attachments. For example design.doc attached to the previous example page will be at twiki/pub/SlicendBread/design.doc. There is also a ,v file for the attachment history.