OT: MoinMoin and Mediawiki?

[Paul Rubin]

Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:
> MediaWiki should run with PHP configured in CGI handler mode, but
> these days mod_php has got its claws just about everywhere anyway. If
> you control your own server and don't have multi-user security
> worries, mod_php is simple enough to install and will probably perform
> better.

Thanks, yes, I could run a special apache instance with mod_php
installed.  I'm pretty good with apache.  I have no MySQL admin
experience but I suppose enough people are using MySQL that the
installation procedures and docs are pretty well developed and I can
follow the instructions.

What I'm wondering is just how big an adventure I'd be setting off on,
simply to get MediaWiki itself installed, configured, and running.
Any thoughts about that?

> For performance I also highly recommend using Turck MMCache or
> equivalent PHP bytecode cache extension. Unlike Python, saving
> compiled bytecode is not the default behavior of PHP, and for
> non-trivial scripts compilation eats up a lot of runtime.

Hmm, that's something I could deal with later, I guess.  Is that
similar to what Zend does?

> >  I'll say that I haven't actually looked at
> > the Mediawiki code, though I guess I should do so.
> 
> Cover your eyes...! it _is_ PHP after all. ;)

Heehee.  I like PHP just fine for small projects.  I just cringe at
the notion of something as complex as MediaWiki being written in PHP
and am constantly, involuntarily thinking about how I would do it in
Python.  I can't help myself.  Without looking at even a line of
WikiMedia's code, I already want to do a total rewrite ;-).

> I would generally recommend you just start with MediaWiki if you
> intend to use it. To migrate a non-tiny site later you'll need to work
> out a migration script to import your data in some way (some people
> have asked about this in the past, I don't know if anyone's ever
> completed one or made it public).

You're probably right, I'll download Wikimedia and see about
installing it.  I have tons of server disk space, though the CPU has
been getting a bit overloaded lately.  

> On the other hand if you _do_ write a MoinMoin-to-MediaWiki
> conversion script (or vice-versa!) we'd love to include it in the
> MediaWiki distribution.

I think a rough approximation would be pretty easy to do.  Trying to
get every detail right would be very difficult.  If I do something like
that, I'll likely go for the rough approximation.