OT: MoinMoin and Mediawiki?

[Brion Vibber]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> Mediawiki is written in PHP and
> is far more complex than MoinMoin, plus it's database backed, meaning
> you have to run an SQL server as well as the wiki software itself
> (MoinMoin just uses the file system).  Plus, I'll guess that it really
> needs mod_php, while MoinMoin runs tolerably as a set of cgi's, at
> least when traffic is low.

MediaWiki should run with PHP configured in CGI handler mode, but these 
days mod_php has got its claws just about everywhere anyway. If you 
control your own server and don't have multi-user security worries, 
mod_php is simple enough to install and will probably perform better.

For performance I also highly recommend using Turck MMCache or 
equivalent PHP bytecode cache extension. Unlike Python, saving compiled 
bytecode is not the default behavior of PHP, and for non-trivial scripts 
compilation eats up a lot of runtime.

>  I'll say that I haven't actually looked at
> the Mediawiki code, though I guess I should do so.

Cover your eyes...! it _is_ PHP after all. ;)

> What I'm getting at is I might like to install MoinMoin now and
> migrate to Mediawiki sometime later.  Anyone have any thoughts about
> whether that's a crazy plan?  Should I just bite the bullet and run
> Mediawiki from the beginning?  Is anyone here actually running
> Mediawiki who can say just how big a hassle it is?

I would generally recommend you just start with MediaWiki if you intend 
to use it. To migrate a non-tiny site later you'll need to work out a 
migration script to import your data in some way (some people have asked 
about this in the past, I don't know if anyone's ever completed one or 
made it public).

On the other hand if you _do_ write a MoinMoin-to-MediaWiki conversion 
script (or vice-versa!) we'd love to include it in the MediaWiki 
distribution.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)