[Mailman-Developers] Wiki woes

[Paul Boddie]

Hello,

Here's a quick update on the ConfluenceConverter effort. A few issues were 
raised after I let you know about the work originally done, and I have 
investigated them to yield the following results.

* The availability of XML exports does not seem to be a problem. It doesn't 
look like my access to the export tools is any different from registered 
users, and the tools seem to give me enough to work with anyway.

* The nature of Confluence 4 markup appears to be an XHTML variant which is in 
some ways easier to parse than the previous markup (in that the tokenisation 
is at least done by an XML parser), although the normalisation of whitespace 
is a bit tricky (as is often the case with XML dialects). Possibly the bulk 
of the work with this is to assess the use and nature of the markup and to 
write reasonable translations.

* The notion of child pages does not exist in MoinMoin, but it is possible to 
construct lists of them and to add them to parent pages so that the 
relationships are at least recorded.

* Similarly, MoinMoin does not have comment items on pages in the way 
Confluence does, but comments can be represented as subpages and then these 
pages can be included in the owner page.

* I noticed that pages with question marks in their names weren't being 
correctly served, but this is actually a mod_rewrite issue specific to the 
way I am currently hosting the test site. My own local site does not exhibit 
the problem, nor should any decent way of hosting the site.

The current state of the conversion can be seen here:

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

The principal updates to this test site are that revisions migrated to 
Confluence 4 markup are translated, child pages are referenced from owner 
pages, and comments are included. However...

* Some pages will look very wrong because things like tables are not yet 
translated. I also have to fine-tune the translation of links and combine the 
logic for both markup types.

* Some child pages don't seem to be available, but this is a combination of 
the question mark issue (see above) and probably my lack of page name quoting 
when incorporating child page information.

* Comments are not well presented at the moment, and I aim to investigate a 
few ways of improving their appearance.

For now, this will have to be all the work I am able to do on this project, 
but I will resume my efforts again in January. I hope that everyone feels 
reassured that this project is no longer forgotten. :-)

Paul

P.S. Some resources:

http://moinmo.in/ConfluenceConverter
http://moinmo.in/ConfluenceConverter/DevelopmentNotes/TaskList