[Mailman-Developers] Wiki Migration Update

[Paul Boddie]

Hello,

Once again, I've had some time to push the wiki migration along. As always, 
the results can be found here:

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

I've updated the archived content to that of 16th July, so the translated 
content should reflect the existing wiki fairly accurately.

Users
-----

Big changes this time have happened around the handling of user information. I 
have modified the MoinMoin package installer to preserve author/editor 
details, a capability which for some reason had been removed from MoinMoin. I 
also need to preserve timestamps as well so that the history of each page 
makes a bit more sense, but at this point you should be able to see 
individual contributions:

http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/DEV/LogoSubmissions?action=info

The XML export archives do not contain user details over and above who edited 
which page (or who uploaded which attachment), but I have written scripts to 
obtain usernames from the archives, to fetch user details from the existing 
wiki, and to create accounts for users in MoinMoin. An alternative might 
involve getting a database query run on the server to provide user details:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/How+to+Export+User+Data+to+CSV+in+Confluence

There's also some kind of export functionality in Atlassian OnDemand, whatever 
that is:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Exporting+wiki+data

But the solution above may be good enough: it just creates an account for each 
existing user and employs the same username, full name (or alias) and e-mail 
address, and sets a random password. It also obtains the URL of any profile 
picture, with these user details obtained by scraping the home page of each 
user on the existing wiki. How people then log into their accounts is 
something we can decide: e-mailing the random password is not exactly secure, 
but they could reset their account in the MoinMoin interface instead (which 
involves a reset e-mail that isn't too secure either, but it's the slightly 
better choice).

Redirects
---------

One thing we also discussed were the redirects that occur for "tiny URLs" and 
where page identifiers are employed. For example:

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

A mapping of page identifiers is extracted from the exported data, and this 
mapping is used to support a simple redirection script that looks up the 
appropriate page name and redirects to that page. One thing it does not yet 
do is to redirect to a specific revision, however.

To Do
-----

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

The way comments are presented on pages still needs improving. I may write a 
macro to include the comment pages in a nicer way and maybe even to allow new 
comments to be added. Meanwhile, the comment pages should now only be 
editable by their original authors (by applying ACLs).

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.

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.

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 a look at your favourite pages and let me know where improvements 
can be made to the conversion process. I usually apologise for pages with 
question marks at the end of their names, which is a lot of the FAQ, but I've 
implemented a mod_rewrite hack that lets you view them, so if your passion is 
for FAQ fidelity then please take this opportunity to have a look.

I hope this is of interest!

Paul