Endeavors in GPLFlash2

So, now that I've tinkered around with it a bit, it looks like MoinMoin could come out as being the wiki that powers GPLFlash. Briefly, here are the pros and cons of the system:

• Pros
  • Seems very hack-able/extensible
  • Log in works (as previously mentioned)
  • User and group permissions are flexible, and lend themselves to delegation and the autonomous operation of sub-groups.
  • Multiple indexing schemes should help both site users and maintainers to find what they need.
  • Categories look like they have potential (but I have not tried the feature yet)
  • With some hacking, RSS support now allows for fine-grained monitoring of the site for page updates
  • The wiki syntax and macros provide a robust set of tools to create, reference, and re-use content within the site
  • Skinnable with CSS, so people can color to taste. Also allows for the possibility of creating accessible versions of the site (e.g., "high contrast," "large print").
  • File uploading/attachments
  • Extensive documentation
• Cons
  • No database, which means the files eat our web quota, we have a file permissions nightmare, and the system is liable to be slower.
  • CGI, and the server doesn't support FastCGI (at least for Python). This is a disadvantage to PHP, which can have a single (or many) long-running threads that can cache things in memory and share info between processes. CGI requires a new process to be started for every request, and any caching must be done to disk.
  • Renaming a page makes all existing links to that page turn into "create this page" links. No redirect is inserted, and the links themselves aren't changed to point at the new page. This may be fixable by modifying the RenamePage plug-in.

If anything else springs to mind, I'll be sure to update this post. In the mean time, I'm probably going to go about re-installing MoinMoin and setting up the site for a test pilot.

# posted by Quandary @ Saturday, June 25, 2005