[Moin-devel] Hi from wiki.apache.org!

[Leo Simons]

Hi gang!

I'm one of the primary admins for the moin-based wiki installation we're 
running at

   http://wiki.apache.org/

some people mentioned talking to some other people who mentioned being 
interested in what we're doing. So here's some yadayada. Brain dump below.

We're running a somewhat modified version of moin 1.1 (most of those 
mods being rather hackery in nature <blush/>). Some of the modifications 
include:

  * wiki farm setup. Each ASF project gets its 'own' wiki installation. 
The codebase 'n stuff is shared, as is, by default, things like CSS. 
There's both shared config and the ability to override that shared 
config. Instances are set up using a commandline (bash) script.

  * cvs-style change notifications. We hacked some of the code (I think 
PageEditor.py) to send all change diffs to a configurable mailing list, 
usually the same list that gets messages on each 'cvs commit' a 
developer makes. This has turned out to be quite valuable, because it 
fits in with the way our developers are used to work.

  * google search macro, ie

    http://wiki.apache.org/general/FindPage?value=FrontPage

and probably half a dozen other things I can't remember right now.
I am planning to find some time to extract these useful bits from our 
installation and submit them somewhere (probably the moin wiki is the 
right place), but you know what life is like (in case you don't: its 
rather busy :-D). We're also planning (well, I am) to upgrade to a more 
recent moin release (I think the most recent one is 1.2?).

We've been busy migrating our UseMod wiki to Moin, and we've written a 
basic shell script in Ruby to handle the data conversion. We're also in 
the progress of migrating a relatively big wiki installment from a 
modified JSPWiki (at wiki.cocoondev.org).

In general, we've been really happy with moin so far! People enjoy the 
better looks and formatting (compared to UseMod), some of the additional 
features (particularly subpages, I think) the farm-based setup, and the 
speediness of it all (which also has to do with running on a very beefy 
machine ;)). For us admins, the fact that the moin pages are plain text 
has really made all sorts of things easier.

Probably the most heard-of complaint is that some of the wiki names that 
work with UseMod don't work with moin, ie JMeterProject will not work 
because its not camel case.

Another issue we've hit is the LPGL-ness of moin. Every ASF developer 
has signed a contributor agreement that ensures everything we contribute 
to the ASF is licensed by us to be licensed under the apache license, 
which is basically just very convenient for people like me (no legalese 
for me to worry about :-D). But that stuff won't fly once we start 
distributing our modifications to moin (I'm not entirely sure why, but 
the LPGL has nasty wording about distribution). So we now have our 
modified version of moin in a private repository (ie, we don't 
distribute any of it), rather than somewhere public where everyone can 
use everything. I need to take a good look at all those legalities 
before I can contribute stuff back here.

End of brain dump :D. Do let me know if you want feedback on anything in 
particular or if there's some questions I raised that need answering...

-- 
cheers!

- Leo Simons

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