[Moin-user] Feedback after completing one year

[Thomas Waldmann]

> Wiki Specification:-
> Moinmoin_184

1.8.5 has some bug fixes.

> mod_wsgi/2.3

2.3 has some known problems. Use some more recent version, if possible.

> 1.       There is big problem for normal user in our company and the
> problem is “GUI-Editor”. The expert user can also write in Text-Editor
> (maximum user 10) and others always use GUI-Editor to write the
> documents. Whenever a user writes a document with the help of
> “GUI-Editor”, he/she needs support/help from administrators and it
> takes much time. Maybe for normal three pages (word-pages) need two
> hours (Off course, it depends on the formatting and diagrams and also
> depends on occurring the BUGs of GUI). I want to ask from moinmoin
> team that there is any plan to improve GUI-Editor in the next year.

If we get specific and detailled bug reports, we maybe can fix some of
its problems.

But note that the way the GUI editor works (editing html and then
converting html to wiki) is non-trivial and as html is more powerful
than wiki markup, it will never support everything html can do.

Also, copy and pasting from MS applications (like word) causes even more
problems, because there is lots of non-standard stuff in the pasted
"html".

Most of the development time likely will go into other areas, though,
like developing moin 2.0 and maintaining 1.9.

> 2.       The second problem is the page with many images. I think that
> moinmoin team is aware of this problem.

Try 1.8.5, there were some win32 fixes related to CacheEntry locking.

If you still encounter problems with 1.8.5, please file a bug report.

> ·         There are lot of material on our intranet site in the form
> of html. Is there a way to simply import this material in wiki? I
> think that there is a way with parser (#format html), but I don’t know
> how professional is it?
> 
> ·         Other big challenge for me is that how can I import our
> product documentations in wiki. There are product documentations on
> intranet site, which are present in two forms; one form is pdf files
> and other “html pages with search functionality” on Intranet.  I think
> it is more than 2,000 pages (pdf format). 

Well, it isn't easy to get data out of some formats like .doc or .pdf -
these formats are mostly usable together with the appropriate
applications, but not easily for anything else.

Thus it might be easier sometimes to just keep that stuff "as is" and
link to it from the wiki. You can also use attachments and xapian search
can even search those.

For some html pages you have, it maybe could work to copy and paste them
into the gui editor to get some of the contents converted to a wiki
page. The more complex the original page is, the more additional work it
might need, though.

> ·         I am realizing that the speed of our wiki page browsing is
> getting slow day by day. It is due the excess of pages in our wiki or
> something else?

I don't think one can answer that without more information.

In general, a fast CPU, lots of RAM, a good filesystem on a fast disk
and a good OS helps.

Some stuff (like e.g. the builtin slow search) works linearly and gets
slower with the amount and size of pages (xapian indexed search is
better for big wikis).

Also, if you put lots of dynamic content on your pages (e.g. macros),
that will need some cpu to process it. If such stuff is overused, your
wiki processes might get cpu bound.