[Moin-user] Wiki suitability by ACL, security, and support

[Thomas Waldmann]

Hi Trevor,

> Hello.  Please let me know if I'm using the wrong mailing list.  

There is only one for moin. :) For everything else we use wiki and irc.

> I am currently evaluating MoinMoin (along with several other wikis) for use within our small development team.  We will be sharing the wiki with clients as well, so we have several criteria that MUST be met:
> 
> 1. WYSIWYG editing

We have that, but take it with a grain of salt (save often :).

What it is doing is non-trivial: it converts html back to wiki markup.

While this usually works rather good for stuff generated by moin, you
shouldn't try to copy and paste some arbitrary stuff from web sites or
microsoft office into it. :)

> 2. Clean interface, small learning curve

Well, moin is quite powerful, so its interface is maybe not as simple as
the one of a less powerful wiki.

But it's for sure not rocket science either. :)

> 3. Fine-grained user access to pages

If you mean access control, yes we have Access Control Lists
(configurable and/or per page, for users, groups, logged-in ("known")
and all users).

> 4. Security (the wiki will be on a server exposed to the internet, but will be private)

Depending on security requirements, you can just use ACLs and/or run the
wiki via SSL and/or use http auth via Apache (moin can re-use the apache
login).

> 5. Good support base

See http://moinmo.in/Support - there is free and commercial support
available.

Usually the best way to get some questions answered rather quickly is to
join our IRC chat channel and just ask and wait. You can also use the
mailing list and the wiki, but it'll be a bit less interactive.

If you just like to get something done (instead of doing it yourself),
you can also buy some commercial support time and have it done by
someone who knows moin best.

> 1. We will want to segregate the clients from each other (ie. they won't be aware of each other), but our development team would need one-login access to all content, across clients.  ie. if a developer logs in, they would have access to all content; if client A logs in, they would only see client A's content, etc.  Am I understanding correctly that "wiki farms" and proper ACL would help us achieve this?  

If you like to configure one wiki per client, yes.

Otherwise (if each client has rather few pages, maybe all subpages of
one main page) you could also use hierarchical ACLs.

Maybe also depends a bit on how much separation you want.

> 2. I'm trying to get an idea of the support base behind MoinMoin: for example, is it one main developer driving the project and supported by several (or many) others?  Or is it truly a community-driven project?  How much of the support relies on one person?  What are users' support experiences like?

That's a bit hard to answer, because it is not black and white.

We have some (few) developers who are long term contributors and now
quite some parts of moin very well. That doesn't necessarily mean that
they are all active all the time (coding for moin is usually just a
hobby, afaik noone is paid to work on moin as a permanent fulltime job
[but some of us did some contract work for some of the features that are
now available under GPL, including the GUI editor integration]).

We were also happy enough to get invited to participate in Google Summer
of Code for the last years, so moin development got quite a speedup due
to some student developers working on it as their main summer task.

There are some developers who know some specific part of moin very well
(e.g. because they wrote or rewrote it).

There are some more developers who contribute patches, fixes, etc. now
and then.

There are some bigger users of moin who have developers who ...

There are some translators, people writing howtos, improving the wiki,
hanging on the IRC channel, or being helpful with *something*.

Cheers,

Thomas