wikis (was Re: [BBLISA] Suggestions for a documentation system)

[Douglas Alan]

miah <miah at chia-pet.org> wrote:

> Weird, I've never had it crash a browser.  But honestly, if a website
> can crash a browser, it sounds more like a browser issue.

I've also never had MoinMoin crash my browser.  I've been using mostly
Safari lately, but I use Firefox from home, and haven't noticed any
problems.

> On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 06:04:34PM -0400, Chaos Golubitsky wrote:

> > We had to move our wiki away from MoinMoin because we had a lot of
> > trouble with the wiki crashing people's browsers (particularly
> > Firefox?) mid-edit.  We're running on MediaWiki now and like it
> > pretty well so far.

MediaWiki is obviously a pretty darn good wiki, as it can handle the
load placed on WikiPedia.  I've heard that it's something of a pain to
install, though, while MoinMoin is a no-brainer.  It even comes with
its own web server if you don't want to configure Apache.

> > Getting data out of MySQL databases isn't very
> > hard --- in the worst case, mysqldump gives you a flat file.

Thanks for the tip.  Another problem I've had with a wiki that uses
MySQL (i.e. TikiWiki) is that they would change the structure of the
database tables between versions, and therefore the upgrade process was
rather painful.  I have no idea if MediaWiki will have such issues in
the future--perhaps their database structure is set in stone--but you're
sure not to have this sort of upgrade headache with flat files.

> > That said, if you want a flat-file wiki, another option is DokuWiki,
> > which is an easy install.

I went with MoinMoin over DokuWiki for two reasons: (1) MoinMoin is
written in Python rather than PHP, and if I ever want to tweak or debug
the source code, I'd much rather work with Python.  (2) MoinMoin has a
much better revision diff facility than DokuWiki.  MoinMoin's is
essentially the same as MediaWiki's.  Every other wiki I've looked at
has had signifcantly inferior diff capabilities.

|>oug