[Moin-user] MoinMoin Questions

Fri May 23 17:13:50 EDT 2008

Welcome Keith!
I cannot comment on most of your questions (you'll need on of the
developers to chime in), but I just wanted to say that it's *because*
Moin doesn't rely on a database back-end that I selected it as my
wiki-software of choice.  :-)  I understand that, on principle, many
people like the idea of a database-driven site-- but I think you'll
find, as long as you don't anticipate as many sustained hits as
Wikipedia.org, that performance is quite fine. :-)

Also, not sure if this helps or not, but I noticed the start of this
database plugin that may help you in pulling data from an existing
database:
http://moinmo.in/MacroMarket/DataBase

-Rick

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 3:25 PM, Keith Hellman
<khellman at mcprogramming.com> wrote:
> Hello All:
>
> I've got three separate projects whose (best) solution involves
> a Wiki.  I've gone through the Wiki Matrix and read through many Wiki
> homepages and FAQs.  I don't think any Wiki out there meets *all*
> of my feature needs, but fortunately I'm comfortable coding up the
> occasional plug-in or patch.
>
> I'd REALLY like to use MoinMoin, it seems to meet most of my needs
> and its written in a language I know.
>
> Before I take the plunge, there are a couple of lingering questions I
> have, if anyone can suggest pointers to documentation or outright
> answers that would be great.
>
> 1.  One of the features I like is that I can produce docbook from MM
> mark-up.  From there it just a couple more pipe-symbols to a high
> quality PDF :^)  Suppose I'd like to generate a PDF of a Wiki at some
> point in the *past* --- is there a straightforward way to do this?
> Actually, I mean straightforward+elegent:  I'm sure I could just
> use datestamps or preemtively record file tree info to make a copy of
> the Wiki...  BTW:  I believe I already know that attachments don't have
> any history, I'm OK with that for now.  Put another way, if MM used a
> version-controlled store, I'd be asking about how to branch, snapshot,
> or tag at some point in history.
>
> 2.  Is there an external mechanism for locking the MM repository?  My
> back-up solution would probably include LVM, so I just need a method
> to momentarily lock the repo until a snapshot is setup.
>
> 3.  (And this is the BIG ONE) Two of my projects are going to be VERY
> media intensive.  Lots of scanned documents, photos, videos and audio.
> So one thing I would REALLY like is a generic media database connected
> to the WiKi in some way.
>
> One solution might be to create pages based on some type of domain
> centric grouping (dates, content, media type,...) and have the media
> elements attached to this page.  The actual page "text" would be treated
> as a free form database (I'm thinking SMTP header-line like formats,
> this would require a Parser plugin?  Forgive me, I'm not quite facile
> with the MM lingo yet). I've noted in some of the docs (FAQ?) that a
> group has done much the same thing (minus the media attachments) for a
> Top 100 Book List.
>
> Otherwise I'd opt for an external database with a Wiki hosted upload
> form.
>
> My understanding is that either would require some sort of MM plugin
> that allows linking to individual media elements from other MM pages.
> It would also support searching and sorting.  My impression is that
> other other plugins do the same (ImageLink, Gallery, ...) sort of thing,
> so I feel like all of this should be possible.
>
> BTW, I really expect this to be a fair amount of media data.  I know of
> at least a gig ready for a wiki now.  Can anyone offer up their
> experience with attaching this much data to MM pages?  Does performance
> suffer?
>
> Finally (and this really isn't a question, just an aside), I've read
> that MM 2.0 will/should/is-hoped-to-have a generic backend interface for
> databases or versioning systems.  I think this would be great, it would
> obviously solve my first question.  In some of my discussions with
> acquaintances that run their own WiKis, this seems to be a
> "look-down-on" feature-hole of MoinMoin.  I'm not sure it should be, it
> is just what I've noticed.
>
> Thanks in advance for everyone's input,
>
> --
> Keith Hellman                             #include <disclaimer.h>
> khellman at mcprogramming.com                from disclaimer import standard
> khellman at mines.edu
>                                   -*-
>                    public key @ pgp.mit.edu 9FCF40FD
>    Y!M: mcprogramming                           AIM/ICQ: 485403897
>                     gtalk: jabber at mcprogramming.com
>                                   -*-
>
> If they want really buzzword-compliant "redundancy" they could add
> another exchange server as part of a "cluster" of "Windows 2003"
> servers with "active directory" so that when things break they
> break spectacularly.
>
> -- Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (http://www.ockers.net/); CLUE-Tech mailing list
>
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