[Mailman-Developers] Converting the Mailman wiki

[Barry Warsaw]

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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