State of the Wiki Software

[Corey Burger]

On 5/6/05, thegreedyturtle <thegreedyturtle at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
> 

The wiki is switching to MoinMoin as a wiki server.

> 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.
> 

Yes, MoinMoin needs some extensions. However, for the doc team, there
are soon going to irrelevant, as we are switching to the portal.

> 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
> 
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