[D-community-discuss] choosing the right CMS

Chris Lale chrislale at untrammelled.co.uk
Mon Mar 5 18:43:39 CET 2007


Hello Holger

Holger Levsen wrote:
> 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.

You could have both a CMS and a wiki and link the two.

I have only a little experience of ikikwiki, but I do know something of 
MediaWiki. So here are some comments with that bias.

>  [...]
>
>
> Things I like about ikiwiki:
>
> - no dynamic pages. After a page is changed, all pages (which need to be 
> recreated) are recreated. 

With MediaWiki there is no need to recreate any page. A page is only 
ever created once and the contents is never lost - even in an attack. 
All future edits are stored as diffs. Is this what you mean by dynamic?

> Advantages of this: very little server load, harder 
> to exploit.
>
> - no PHP. -> Harder to exploit.
>   

This is a good point in ikiwiki's favour.

> - being written with security as a priority
>   

... but is a young project and carries a warning about possible security 
issues. These should be quickly sorted though. The main problem with any 
wiki is not so much security as _spam_.

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

Media wiki also has RSS feeds and utf8-support see 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_feature_list

> - 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 a revision control link is a useful feature if you are going to 
be developing software or Debian-doc/Linux-doc type documentation. (Have 
you got ikiwiki "history working"? I have not been successful yet.)

> - good, extendable design. For example, the markup-language is realized via 
> plugins (the default markup-language is very easy email like syntax). 

I like this approach. It means that you could opt to use standard 
wiki-text eg if accessibility is an issue, or choose something else.

> 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. 
>   

MediaWiki is a mature (and large) 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. 
>   

MediaWiki does automatic notification of changes.

Perhaps it would be possible to run a separate ikiwiki for each language 
and have inter-wiki links? (This is an approach used by MediaWiki.)

> I also want to know what you think, why ikiwiki is 
> a bad choice and mediawiki (or moinmoin) is better.

I think the choice of wiki software depends on the _purpose_ of the wiki.

If the purpose is to develop software, MediaWiki
 * does not link to CVS or SVN
This might be a disadvantage.

If the purpose is to develop documentation, MediaWiki has these useful 
features:
 * produces  TOC  automatically.
 * produces  optional numbered headings automatically.
 * No need for CamelCase when creating links.
 * Allows namespaces.
 * Allows links to individual section, not just pages.
 * Allows transclusion of atomic nodes - could be a single word or a 
whole section - into pages.
 * Allows inclusion of graphics eg screenshots.
 * Allows subpages
 * Allows classification of pages into categories so that you can have 
category views (eg for level of difficulty, particular distribution, 
type of installation (eg desktop, mail server, webserver), etc.
 * has good internal search (title and text).

It also has features that make it accessible and easier to manage a 
large wiki:
 * Editor toolbar
 * anti-spam features and spam blacklisting
 * email notification
 * multilanguage support
 * third-party plugins ("extensions")
 * RSS feeds
 * utf8-support

I wonder whether the choice of software would be easier when the 
objectives of the project and the purpose of the wiki are clearer?

-- 
Chris.




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