[Mailman-Developers] Wiki Migration Update

[Paul Boddie]

Hello,

Time has passed and some more time has been spent on the wiki migration. As 
always, the results can be found here:

http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/

The archived content now reflects the real wiki from yesterday - 2nd November 
- so the translated content should reflect the existing wiki fairly accurately 
and include recent edits.

Dates and History
-----------------

One matter that was not addressed at all before now was that of accurate date 
information in the page histories. I needed to patch the MoinMoin package 
installer for this, and there turns out to be a good reason why it doesn't 
support preserving the editing dates: the edit log would need sorting 
afterwards, and that would probably need to be done offline. Moreover, taking 
different packages of pages and combining them requires the histories from the 
different packages to be merged, so I had to write a script to do this.

The result is that, subject to time zone ambiguity, the edit dates should be 
accurate in the converted content and the RecentChanges should reflect what 
you see on the current Confluence wiki.

Users
-----

Last time, I reintroduced user details to the migrated wiki, but one item that 
remains is that of actually importing users. To illustrate user import, I 
imported four recent users of the wiki that happened to be useful for testing 
various aspects of the conversion. For example:

http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/DEV/A_5_minute_guide_to_get_the_Mailman_web_UI_running

Here, you'll see that the comments at the bottom of the page bear the name of 
the commenter, who helpfully supplied some non-ASCII characters in her name so 
that I could encounter some problems with MoinMoin's command option handling. 
:-)

As I mentioned last time, the method of acquiring user profile information is 
not as satisfactory as that of getting the page data out of Confluence, but I 
imagine that people will want to review the user list, exclude obvious 
spammers, and then send out account reset e-mails - there must be some e-mail 
experts here willing to do that nicely ;-) - and so the process will 
necessarily involve some manual work.

Redirects
---------

Also done last time were redirects:

http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/x/AgA3
http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=3604482

This time, I've added support for various other Confluence URL paths, such as 
searching:

http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/dosearchsite.action?searchQuery.queryString=exim&searchQuery.spaceKey=DOC

The special PDF export action is supported, although this really requires 
Java, fop, xsltproc and DocBook XSL resources:

http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/pages/doexportpage.action?pageId=3604482&type=TYPE_PDF

Confluence seems to use this kind of URL as well:

http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/spaces/flyingpdf/pdfpageexport.action?pageId=3604482

And there's also the highly sophisticated dashboard action (which just 
redirects to the front page):

http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/dashboard.action

Comments
--------

I have reviewed the import of comments and improved the functionality of the 
MoinMoin extensions supporting new comments. I gave an example of comments 
above in the "Users" section.

New comments assign complete ownership of a comment to the author, but that 
author must have write access to the page on which the comment will appear 
(even though they are actually making a subpage). Existing comments from 
Confluence already assign ownership to the author of the comment when 
converted.

To Do
-----

I always provide a list of things that still need doing, so here are some 
familiar items:

It might also be nice to have a list of attachments on pages that have them, 
and I will take a look to see how Confluence tends to present such things. 
(I'm not sure if this is a great priority, though. You can always follow the 
"Attachments" link to see what's there.)

User home pages should probably be populated and have things like profile 
images (if provided), activity indicators, and maybe the dashboard 
functionality should be emulated, too. (People agreed that this wasn't a 
priority.)

In Conclusion
-------------

As I have mentioned previously, the source code for the converter can be found 
here:

http://hgweb.boddie.org.uk/ConfluenceConverter/

Please take another look at your favourite pages and let me know if anything 
has gone badly wrong in the conversion process.

With this I hope we are nearing the point of final migration.

Paul