Converting the Mailman wiki
Greetings folks,
I'm part of the new group that John Sullivan of the FSF has brought together to look at migrating the Mailman wiki from Confluence to MoinMoin.
We've all just been introduced to each other so we're still very much at the beginning of getting ourselves organised; I've said that I would get in contact with you to ask a few initial questions to help us on our way.
So - here we go, and in no particular order:
- It looks like confluence supports XML exports for the purpose of
backup/restore Have you done this? If the confluence database is in a proprietary format I would this this might be the best way to get at the data. I would also think that it might contain the most complete version of the data (apart from direct access to the database) in terms of preserving meta-data like authorship and version history.
- If the export is not available / possible for some reason what would
you suggest would be the best approach for us to access the wiki? Do we just need accounts within the wiki, or do we need an account on the hosting server?
- A rather open-ended question - but what is your priority in terms of
the migration? By this I mean: - which content from the wiki (could be all of it!) - how much meta-data (version history, authors, etc.) - administrative data like users and logins (nb. it may not be possible to bring passwords across)
And of course any other comments and suggestions are very welcome.
Cheerio,
Brad
Bradley Dean Email: bjdean@bjdean.id.au Skype: skype@bjdean.id.au Mobile(Aus): +61-413014395 WWW: http://bjdean.id.au/ S/MIME: http://bjdean.id.au/certs/email-public-rsa.txt
Hi Bradley,
On May 06, 2011, at 02:22 PM, Bradley Dean wrote:
I'm part of the new group that John Sullivan of the FSF has brought together to look at migrating the Mailman wiki from Confluence to MoinMoin.
Excellent!
We've all just been introduced to each other so we're still very much at the beginning of getting ourselves organised; I've said that I would get in contact with you to ask a few initial questions to help us on our way.
So - here we go, and in no particular order:
- It looks like confluence supports XML exports for the purpose of backup/restore Have you done this? If the confluence database is in a proprietary format I would this this might be the best way to get at the data. I would also think that it might contain the most complete version of the data (apart from direct access to the database) in terms of preserving meta-data like authorship and version history.
The administrative interface does have options to download for backup an XML dump of the data. There's currently a big red warning saying it's disabled "for security purposes", so I don't really know if it works, or what it gives you. I'm certainly willing to give at least one member of your team administrative access, and we can verify with the hosting provider that you should be able to get the XML dump. If that's not enough data to do the job, then we'll talk to the hosting provider about getting what you need.
- If the export is not available / possible for some reason what would you
- suggest would be the best approach for us to access the wiki? Do we just
- need accounts within the wiki, or do we need an account on the hosting
- server?
We don't have accounts on the hosting server, but Contegix's customer support has always been very good about responding to our requests, so I'm confident we can get you the data you'll need.
- A rather open-ended question - but what is your priority in terms of the
- migration? By this I mean:
- which content from the wiki (could be all of it!)
Yes, I'd like to import everything, including attachments. A couple of things though:
- We have a number of groups to manage write permission and such. We've used
that to control wiki spam. I don't know enough about Moin's user and permission model to know how that will map, but if possible I'd like to keep as close to the current arrangement as possible.
Some pages are private to the steering committee. However, I *think* there's only one such page and it's pretty out of date, so I really don't care if we just remove it.
We have a nice u/i mockup plugin called Balsamiq, which (you guessed it) is not free software. Okay, so we'll lose that, but I'd like to at least keep png/jpg/gif/pdf of the existing mockups.
- how much meta-data (version history, authors, etc.)
We'd definitely like to keep history. Authors I suppose will be difficult if we don't import the user database (I don't know what if any of that is available in the XML dump). Ideally, we'd like to keep as much metadata as is available.
- administrative data like users and logins (nb. it may not be possible
- to bring passwords across)
Right. I'm okay if people have to do a password reset to gain access. Ideally we'd at least port over the users. I'm also okay if that's not possible.
And of course any other comments and suggestions are very welcome.
Nothing more from me at the moment. Mark might have additional comments since he's probably the most frequent author on the wiki. Thanks for your help!
-Barry
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On 5/6/2011 8:14 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
- We have a number of groups to manage write permission and such. We've used
that to control wiki spam. I don't know enough about Moin's user and permission model to know how that will map, but if possible I'd like to keep as close to the current arrangement as possible.
Moin supports groups and access controls by group. Management of these is different from Confluence, but I think it can map reasonably well.
- Some pages are private to the steering committee. However, I *think* there's only one such page and it's pretty out of date, so I really don't care if we just remove it.
Moin can handle this.
Right. I'm okay if people have to do a password reset to gain access. Ideally we'd at least port over the users. I'm also okay if that's not possible.
I think it will be possible to port the existing usernames, and as long as we have email addresses for them, they can do a password reset.
There is an issue in that Moin likes CamelCase UserNames. It's not a requirement, but without it, the username doesn't link to the user's home page. User home pages are not required, but they can be handy.
I don't know if it's relevant at this point since we've already decided on Moin, but if anyone wants to look at or even play with a small Moin wiki, go to http://www.grizz.org/wiki/, and if you have any questions after looking/playing, ask me. It's OK to add pages to this wiki, but I will probably delete them after a short time.
Nothing more from me at the moment. Mark might have additional comments since he's probably the most frequent author on the wiki. Thanks for your help!
I don't have anything at the moment beyond what's above.
Mark Sapiro mark@msapiro.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Hi Barry and co.,
On 07/05/11 01:14, Barry Warsaw wrote:
I'm part of the new group that John Sullivan of the FSF has brought together to look at migrating the Mailman wiki from Confluence to MoinMoin.
Excellent!
Though there's not much there at the moment you can see what we're up to here:
https://gitorious.org/confluence2moinmoin
https://gitorious.org/confluence2moinmoin/pages/Home
http://lists.bjdean.id.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mmwiki
The administrative interface does have options to download for backup an XML dump of the data. There's currently a big red warning saying it's disabled "for security purposes", so I don't really know if it works, or what it gives you. I'm certainly willing to give at least one member of your team administrative access, and we can verify with the hosting provider that you should be able to get the XML dump. If that's not enough data to do the job, then we'll talk to the hosting provider about getting what you need.
If one of you has access to export the backup XML and send it through to me (or point me to a download URL if it's large) I would think that would be sufficient. We shouldn't need ongoing access to Confluence. I would expect that we could analyse the initial data dump, build and test the conversion process and then ask for one more export just before the switch-over.
On the other hand if you'd prefer us to make the export please set up an account for me and I'll see what I can do (I'm not familiar with Confluence, so it might take me longer to find it and check that the export was running as expected).
Nothing more from me at the moment. Mark might have additional comments since he's probably the most frequent author on the wiki.
I agree with Mark's comments on MoinMoin - it does support most of what you asked for in terms of history, attachments, groups and private pages. User groups and accesses can be defined in anticipation of the existence of a user account (ie you can define an acl which refers to a user that doesn't exist yet). There's a bit of a security problem there so I would think we'd also create user accounts with a random password and the user's email address - which can then be used for a reset.
Until we see the XML export we can't really say how much of that data we can get to in order to transform it across - but I'd be surprised if a lot of that data was not available.
I was going to say that our meta-data (other than author and revisions) support is a bit limited in moin1, however looking at the wiki pages in Confluence is doesn't look like there's much more there (or at least it's not being used). There may be better support in moin2 howver our advice from Thomas Waldmann of MoinMoin (http://moinmo.in/ThomasWaldmann) is that we should be aiming for 1.9 as 2 is not yet ready for production.
Thanks for your help!
No worries! Thanks for Mailman!
Cheerio,
Brad
participants (3)
-
Barry Warsaw -
Bradley Dean -
Mark Sapiro