State of the Wiki Software

[thegreedyturtle]

Hello again,
I'm sending this immediately after my last one, but it's a separate
topic and I thought it deserved a separate email.

Why is our wiki software so goofy?

There's a lot of chatter going on about switching everything over to
MoinMoin markup, but being hesitant because people aren't sure if
MoinMoin is gonna stick... if anyone can give a definite about this I'd
like to hear about it myself. On a side note, are there any good
MoinMoin editors out there? I'm really sick of doing my markup testing
on the live servers. Mostly because they are slow - that's for later
though.

I like MoinMoin because it's simple, and that encourages people who
might be a little hesitant to add their knowledge.

If we are going to use the MoinMoin markup, is there someone out there
working on actually getting it to work right? I'd really like to see
block quotes and bullets working correctly. Right now I've been avoiding
blockquotes in their entirety since they screw up the bullets in the
page. And what is up with the blue bullets? That's way off style in my
opinion. Gimmie a brown or black...

Example:
Compare these two documents that are considered finished from the
WikiToDo.
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/SSHHowto and
https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/CronHowto
Both are good technically, but you can easily see which one is nicer to
read. And I'm sorry to say, but you can't actually create the SSHHowto
with MoinMoin markup, or at least I don't know how to at the moment. The
author of SSHHowto used reStructured markup to do that document.

I feel that the way a page looks really increases it's readability,
especially having a simple, but strong visual presence. Everyone knows
of a publisher out there that does this really effectively, but even the
O'Reilly people are just replicating the good stuff from technical
documentation. Really, all that's needed to make stuff look like
SSHHowto is: blockquotes, and a group of images that people can EASILY
ACCESS and see on every editing page, those being: a note, a tip, and a
warning. Maybe a couple more like one for anecdotes, just so people have
them if they want them, I also really like the idea of a quick link to
the MoinMoin markup page so that peopple can check it as they work.

The biggest problem though is it's speed. Let's face it, UbuntuLinux.org
is slow, and the wiki is a lot slower, and I have a question which may
be a little newbie - Why is the entire wiki served via https? I
understand that you have to login, and you get extra options on the page
when you do, but is there a way to just go ahead serve everything
without encryption and block access to people who can't use various
things? I'd prefer this anyway, since I know that it took me a while to
figure out how to edit pages when I got started. So it would have saved
me a minute or three if I got hit with a 'you must login to edit a page'
instead of just hiding the edit tab from me.
Anyhoo, I'm just throwing that out there, maybe I don't know what I'm
talking about in terms of the https and encryption.

Cheers,
thegreedyturtle