OT: MoinMoin and Mediawiki?

[Alexander Schremmer]

On 10 Jan 2005 18:45:16 -0800, Paul Rubin wrote:

> I need to set up a wiki for a small group.  I've played with MoinMoin
> a little bit and it's reasonably straightforward to set up, but
> limited in capabilities and uses BogusMarkupConventions.

At which point do you see limitations?
And what of the markup don't you like?

> In the larger world, though, there's currently One True wiki package,
> namely Mediawiki (used by Wikipedia).

It is just very famous because of Wikipedia IMHO.

>  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).

Having a DBMS backend is good in your opinion? It has some severe
disadvantages like not easy to scale (you would need to setup DBMS
replication), two potential points of failure, more complex setup, bigger
memory requirements, etc.

>  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.

Both should run fine in CGI mode I guess.

> 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?

If you really want to use the wiki for content, you have to agree on a
markup style. You could use an independent one (like RestructuredText) and
hope that MediaWiki supports it (MoinMoin does). Or you end up writing
complex migration scripts just for the markup.

Finding some script which just imports the data files into the DB should be
rather easy.

>  Should I just bite the bullet and run Mediawiki from the beginning?

IMHO you should not bite it but choose MoinMoin. :-)

> Is anyone here actually running Mediawiki who can say just how
> big a hassle it is?

A few months I tried to install it. I got it running. But I did not like
the necessary complex administration tasks.

> The other one will be public and is planned grow to medium size (a few
> thousand active users), but which I don't need immediately.  I
> definitely want the second one to eventually run Mediawiki.  I can
> probably keep the first one on MoinMoin indefinitely, but that would
> mean I'm eventually running two separate wiki packages, which gets
> confusing.

There are even MoinMoin sites that are as big as that. Maybe you should
rethink your kind of prejudice and re-evaluate MoinMoin.

Kind regards,
Alexander