Dave Sanders
Email: <vulgrin AT yahoo.com> AIM: Vulgrin The MAD
Hello all. My name is Dave Sanders and I recently discovered the Wild World of Wiki a few months ago. Since then I've started up and customized an OpenWiki site at my company, and have quickly created a collaborative information space where there was none. It was truly amazing to see years of useful information, that was scattered around a dozen different sources, start to emerge into a centralized system. I've tried many initatives over the past 5 years, at several different companies, to try to get folks to consolidate corporate information. Nothing has ever had the adoption rate as high as this Wiki.
So, I'm now fascinated by the concepts and looking around to see what different flavors are out there. I believe OpenWiki was loosely based on MoinMoin, so I'm travelling up the family tree to check it out.
It was designed using different technology, but adopted a lot of the markup and "look and feel". I took revenge by reversing the process for some features.
I am continually coming up with new ideas, some good, some bad, to extend Wiki technology. I'm currently on the hunt for what I think the "best of breed" Wiki is, and then either modifying it to suit my needs (giving my code back to the community, of course) or creating a new Wiki, with what I think are the best ideas, as far as architecture, features, and design. And I'd likely do this in dotNET, even though I'm recently leaning heavily to OSS languages.
So with all that said, why is MoinMoin so much better? Feel free to add your advocacy statements to this page, or point me to the places you think I should be looking at to understand why you use MoinMoin.
MoinMoin Advocacy
What I dislike in every other wiki is the lack of MoinMoin's bookmarks. I constantly wonder why noone else adopted the idea, it's the best way to 100% follow evolution of a wiki's content. -- JürgenHermann 2002-11-29 00:46:49
MoinMoin is implemented in Python - a powerful, easy to learn, object oriented language. This is a major advantage. Just look yourself. -- ThomasWaldmann 2002-11-29 15:47:25
I agree on the Python front - mainly because its cross platform and simple and straightforward. In fact, regardless of MoinMoin, I'm exploring and learning some Python for other reasons. But exploring the code for this Wiki will help me learn it easier... -- DaveSanders 2025-05-03 22:03:24
My current Wiki Questions
Why don't Wikis use WYSIWYG editors? Is it because its harder? Cross browser issues? Want Wiki contributors to be part of a secrect club who think in consequtive equal signs?
- : My own observations from my current userbase is that people seem to pick up wiki tags very easily... and they only pick up the ones that they REALLY need to use at any time. I've seen people double-click a page and look at how someone else formatted something, and learn from that. Its pretty amazing to me actually, considering some of these folks are "business users" who would never think to learn HTML...
My MoinMoin Experience
I'm playing with MoinMoin on my local machine now, and figured I could catalog some of my thoughts and experiences on the whole matter and answer some of my own questions above. So far, so good, so I guess I can call this MoinMoin Advocacy. 
Installation
Installing this on Win XP, under IIS. I had installed the normal Python distro, but recently installed ActiveState's Python, so I could give their Visual Python tool a test run. Everything worked great and very quickly, except for one error because I didn't read the instructions well enough. Up and running with someone who knows just a little Python, but is fairly experienced in IIS and setting up tools like this, in about 10 minutes. A testament to excellent step by step instructions.
I quickly started customizing my first instance and ran into something that I want opinions on: When you are adding files for a particular instance, such as changing the logo of one of your Wikis, should you just throw everything under the \wiki folder, or should you place it in your instances folder? I know it doesn't matter, if you change the url path in the config, but I'm asking for "best practices" purposes. (For the record, I created a new \img folder under my instance and added a new url_path variable... since I figure I'll be doing this elsewhere.
Another question: Why is there not / how about a GUI to manage the config file? I'm looking at the HelpOnConfiguration page, but there isn't a huge amount of detail on some of the settings.
writing a "GUI" for the config is nonsense as the config is a (normally simple) python program. But it is not limited to that, you have the full power of python for the config, so writing and using a GUI instead of simply using an editor wouldn't make that much sense. -- ThomasWaldmann 2002-12-01 11:50:29
Well, I understand your point, but thats part of the problem with many of the Wikis that are out there, including this one. It is expected that the administrator has the expertise and the where-with-all to dig into the code to configure the basic parts of the system. While there may be unlimited flexibility in using the "full power of python" to set up the configuration, its not neccessarily useful to end users. I don't think either side of the debate is the "only right way", but rather giving end users a system that allows them to use the system in the easiest possible, best way, for their particular needs. -- DaveSanders
what you want (an easy end-user wiki for private use) is done by a good packaged moin - e.g. install it at standard locations, have correct dependencies and drop a apache fragment into a directory completely included by apache. Then you just go to http://localhost/moinwiki and tataa! So what is needed are packages for debian (in or compatible with stable!), redhat, suse and mandrake - and for windows (sorry, forgot that one
). No, I'm not volunteering. -- ThomasWaldmann 2002-12-02 04:36:59