Tiago Rinck Caveden wrote:
> 
> XWiki is free software... The entire source is readable by the whole
> world... and this is good!
> 
> I think the opposite way actually. No point in hiding if there is no
> important secret there. Spread the knowledge.
> 

That is one of the things Open Source lists as a strong point, the ability to 
view the code and see 
how it works. Sure, people are afraid that attackers can see holes in the 
source and take advantage 
of them, but that is the closed source way of thinking. But it is well known 
that it never prevents 
attacks from happening. On the other hand, when the code can be seen by anyone, 
good hackers can 
detect those holes and provide patches for them before a bad cracker gets the 
idea to try and attack 
the site. The open model is always better.

Let's put it this way, if an attacker wants to attack a site, he will do it 
with or without the 
code. If a good hacker wants to help, he won't do it if he has to reverse 
engineer. He can't provide 
a patch if he doesn't have something to patch first. So a hidden hole is more 
likely to remain a 
hole than an open one.

Anyway, the way XWiki is made, the templates can be (re)placed in many ways, 
not only as files in 
/templates/, but as files in /skins/XYZ/, attachments to a wiki document, or 
fields in a wiki 
object. This makes XWiki the most flexible and customizable web development 
platform ever, but 
requires that you take care of your code, as it will always be open (for 
viewing).

One solution around this would be to have a custom file with macros, placed in 
WEB-INF, and 
registered as a global macro file in velocity.properties (note that this 
doesn't work starting with 
1.5, as global macros work differently in the new velocity component). The 
restriction is that only 
macros can be used that way, and not actual templates. You can, however, define 
each "template" code 
as a macro, and put only one macro call in the actual template file.
-- 
Sergiu Dumitriu
http://purl.org/net/sergiu/
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