wiki plans

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Hi guys

Congrats to the doc team for getting off to such a fast start, it's 
amazing to see it blossoming like this.

Moin was a quickstart option for us, but I'd like to make the wiki a 
more central part of the web site, so we are going to be switching to A 
wiki that is integrated with the website as of Monday.

The wiki will support the following formats:

  - native HTML
  - ReStructuredText (a very nice format)
  - StructuredText (not great)
  - Moin *without* tables

We will have to convert the existing tables in the (*fantastic*) 
hardware section of the wiki to HTML to ReStructuredText.

The new wiki has some glitches and gotchas that we will fund development 
on, but which we'll have to live with for now:

 - it doesn't have the same level of revision control
 - doesn't do Moin tables (but does native HTML and ReStructuredText tables)
 - preview mode is very new, so you pretty much need to get it right 
first time

But it has some big advantages:

 - it's fully integrated with the web site search, so searching on the 
main site will find relevant wiki pages
 - it inherits the full skin of the main web site

Not only that, but we will be able to give permissions for the doc team 
to edit FAQ's, HOWTO's, and other web site documents directly.

The new wiki will be at http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/

Steve Alexander (stevea) is responsible for the wiki code update on 
Monday, Brad Bollenbach (bradb) will be handling the actual execution of 
that. Louise McCance Price (lulu) has overall respnsibility for the web 
site.

We'll try to big-bang it on Monday so that it Just Works, and at the 
same time send out a mail telling folks how to log in to the site to 
work on the wiki.

It will need registering in the new site, but we promise that's the last 
registration you'll ever need to work with the web site or any of our 
infrastructure, as we finally have a robust backend for it all.

Cheers, and once again WOW and thank you to the emerging doc team.

Mark

>If this splits into two different focus points, the doc team will than
>have to clear stuff with the wikiteam before we start making large
>changes and right now we are trying to make alot of standards across
>both regular docs and wiki.  A main goal is to have a moin2docbook
>converter so we can change some wiki into docbook for seperate
>distribution.  If two teams exist out of this it will cause conflict in
>the end.  I say if you want to just work on the wiki than do so, but
>there is no need for two seperate teams.
>  
>