[D-community-discuss] choosing the right CMS

[Andrew Donnellan]

On 3/4/07, Holger Levsen <debian at layer-acht.org> wrote:
>
> 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.)

MediaWiki is of course what all newbies are used to as WP uses it,
however as wiki software for anything else it's not that great.

Other than wiki.d.o I haven't really used MoinMoin much, so I won't
comment on it.

>
> 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

I suppose as it can use an RCS the RCS would handle ACLs and similar itself?

>
> - 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.

This is good - it's also useful for mirroring and backing up the wiki.

>
> - 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.

AFAICS default IkiWiki uses CamelCase links. How hard would it be to
modify that?

>
> - 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.

IkiWiki looks good to me :)

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Andrew Donnellan
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