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Currently we're considering moving the WLUG wiki from PhpWiki (or WlugWiki, as we are really running a fork of PhpWiki by now) to MediaWiki?.

This isn't about pros or cons of either piece of software!

Conversion of Wiki Content

I'm currently working on a script that was originally written by Isaac Wilcox. This does a reasonable first pass on converting the wiki markup, however there's a lot of things it doesn't do yet, mostly involving any old-style wiki markup, which is rife throughout the WLUG wiki.

Also, having migrated the content, every page will need to be visited, and checked for validity, and resaved. This is very important! A lot of the 'special' pages within Mediawiki only get updated when a page gets saved. The Backlinks and Category equivalents are obvious examples. We can let this happen "as the wiki gets used", but the fact is for the new site to work properly we will have to do this. We could, I suppose, write something which simulates editing then saving a page, which will address the automagic pages, but won't confirm the markup was translated completely.

I'm aware that if we aim for 100% conversion we'll probably fail, but what we're probably looking at is approximately 80% of the wiki markup being converted at the moment, and still a requirement to walk across pretty well all of the 7000 odd pages in the wiki.

Plugins

There's a bunch of plugins we've written - WlugMember? being one of them - that will have to be rewritten. This probably isn't such an onerous chore, as most of the plugins we've written are pretty simple, however it's something that must be taken into account.

Extensions

We've also added a lot of extensions, such as the spam limiting and google query banner. These will need to be reimplemented. I think MediaWiki? has a much nicer framework for adding these at least - it probably won't involve hacking the theme directly like it did in phpwiki, but this needs to be taken into account.

Current things that rely on the wiki

  • meeting reminder bot (parses wiki page content)
  • library (relies on the wiki style sheet)
  • WantedWikis generation
  • modify/remove GreenStone full-text index of wiki
  • pci database (better integration)
  • committee fortnightly reminder bot (parses wiki page content)

Problems with the current wiki that we hope to address

  • No (easy) security updates, as we are a fork of PhpWiki
  • No ability to fix font problems across platforms due to PhpWiki nesting tags
  • No ability to do any kind of layout inside pages, eg. text to the right of an image, a floating text box in a page (to move Coming Up from the sidebar to the main page)

One big issue is that Mediawiki markup sucks rocks. It doesn't have any concept of blocks; it would be like converting the wiki back to old markup. I don't know how well Mediawiki is designed internally, but the markup used is a very big deal, and Mediawiki rides the short bus as far as that is concerned.

Personally, I'd suggest taking a look at MoinMoin instead. Check out the GNOME Live! for an example of a decently busy and relatively large wiki running MoinMoin. The MoinMoin formatter doesn't seem to understand blocks either, but at least it uses indentation and remembers context across linebreaks in enough cases that it can be considered sane enough. And the wiki engine comes with a few neato features.

Also, it's Python, which will please PerryLorier :) and is better than PHP anyway.

--AristotlePagaltzis