[D-community-discuss] choosing the right CMS

[Holger Levsen]

Hi,

to be able to work on content and to be able to create a nice design for 
debian-community.org we need to choose and setup a CMS.

I think a wiki is the way to go. A wiki, where most pages are open to be 
edited, moved and deleted by everyone, while some pages have stricter access 
control to prevent unwanted changes.

At the moment I think the pages which need access control are the ones about 
debian-community(.org) itself. First, because the policies should not be 
changed everyday and by everyerone and second (and probably more important), 
to allow coordinated translations.

Luckily (almost?) every wiki supports access controls and RSS feeds of 
changes. (BTW, for those who dont know rss2email, check it out, it's really 
handy, esp. for such feeds :)

I think, we have three choices: moinmoin (as this is the wiki used by Debian, 
which allows easy copying from and back), mediawiki (used by Newbiedoc, 
wikipedia, DebConf) and ikiwiki (quite new, very customisable and more, see 
below.)

Things I like about ikiwiki:

- no dynamic pages. After a page is changed, all pages (which need to be 
recreated) are recreated. Advantages of this: very little server load, harder 
to exploit.

- no PHP. -> Harder to exploit.

- being written with security as a priority

- supports static pages from different sources (e.g. svn) and offline editing, 
generates RSS feeds, has utf8-support.

- unlike many wikis, ikiwiki does not have its own ad-hoc means of storing 
page history, and instead uses a revision control system such as Subversion.

- good, extendable design. For example, the markup-language is realized via 
plugins (the default markup-language is very easy email like syntax). Also 
the code base is small and the upstream author is Joey Hess, a (very active 
and good) debian developer.

- it's a young (still small) and active project. 

- I envision automatic notification of translation teams if specific pages are 
changed, because ikiwiki is build with extendability in mind and because it's 
still young and we know upstream, I hope this will be easy. 

See http://ikiwiki.info/ for more.


I do prefer ikiwiki (and at least in the beginning I'll be probably be the 
person setting it up), but I also want to know what you think, why ikiwiki is 
a bad choice and mediawiki (or moinmoin) is better.

As said before, I'll reply to the old mails on this list (which partly deal 
with the CMS question and partly how to organize the content) later, now I'll 
go outside and "enjoy the weather" ;-) 


regards,
	Holger
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