[D-community-discuss] choosing the right CMS

[Chris Lale]

Andrew Donnellan wrote:
> 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.

Of course, if you are creating just a documentation site, MediaWiki 
would be ideal. Perhaps you need a CMS linked to a separate wiki? The 
CMS would contain the protected pages. The choice might depend on 
whether D-community is  monolithic project or a modular one.

>
> 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 :)
>


-- 
Chris.