Tag Archives: mediawiki

Two Weeks of Wiki Hell

December 7, 2006

I understand I volunteered for the job (it’s a dirty job and I think very few people would want to do it) but boy am I glad it’s done. I’ve just spent nearly two weeks converting content from the Mandriva development wiki (http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main) in TWiki to the new MediaWiki setup at http://mdv.vmlinuz.ca/. That will not be the final home for the new wiki, of course… currently we’re waiting on IS Team to get MediaWiki setup and integrated with the authentication system used with the other Mandriva sites. I’m told it should probably be up and ready next week at some point.

So for those of you who work on the development wiki, please do your work on the new site instead. I’ve asked Warly to make the old one read-only to keep the content available in case I’ve missed anything, but to prevent people from editing what’s already been imported.

I used a combination of a perl script that Thierry wrote to do the bulk of the dirty work and a BBEdit Text Factory as well (I wrote the latter based on the former after about a week since the perl script relied on a Mandriva perl module and I didn’t feel like installing that on OS X). I’ve made both the script and the Text Factory available for download for others to other use or just peek at. The problem with these scripts is they’re not the be-all and end-all, especially on a site with many different contributors… everyone seems to have their own style and syntax and boy does that make conversion interesting.

Aside from proofing, spell-checking, and styling, the wiki is pretty much done. As it stands, it looks much better than the TWiki did and the performance seems much better as well. Of course, once the proofing and spelling and everything else is done, it will look absolutely killer. We have a lot of content (379 pages to be approximate (well, according to MediaWiki’s stats)).

So, enjoy the new wiki. I know I sure like it better. But I must admit… I’ve lost pretty much all interest in even looking at a wiki for a while… kinda like when you’ve eaten pizza for two weeks and don’t want to eat it again for the better part of a year.

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Mandriva wiki in the works

November 25, 2006

Well, I’ve decided that since it’s been over a month now and no one has decided yet on what software to use (apparently there’s one hold-out for xwiki while everyone else wants mediawiki… hello… VETO!), I’ve decided to make it monumentally in mediawiki’s favor by cramming so much bloody content onto the in-the-works conversion site I initially set up to make it feel like it’s not worth it throw all my effort away. =) How’s that for sneaky?

Errr.. hmmm… admitting this on my blog defeats the purpose of being sneaky doesn’t it?

Sorry, long day. Two days actually. I’ve converted a fair chunk of content over in the last two days… a week of that would probably result in the entire twiki site being converted.

Anyways, my eyes are tired and my arms (and ass) are sore so I’m gonna go read a book or just listen to my ipod. Had to note, however, that this isn’t being let go… using Thierry’s conversion script that we both worked on (he more than I) I’ve been cruising. It’s not 100%, but it’s pretty good and I’ve probably gone 2-3x (if not more) faster because of it.

Lots of work yet, but I think it’s coming along nicely.

(Ok Planet Mandriva… do your thing and inspire the hordes to demand a mediawiki-based replacement to that god-awful mess we currently have!)

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Mandriva development wiki conversion

September 30, 2006

On Thursday I brought up, on the maintainers@ mailing list, the question that had been dicussed a few months ago and discussed on the cooker list from about April-June, regarding the restructing of the Mandriva Linux Development Community wiki with the possibility of moving if from that hideous POS TWiki to something a whole lot more extensible and faster, MediaWiki.

What came of the first discussion (which spanned about three months) was this demo site which, while looking pretty, has a whole bunch of (in my mind) flaws to it… primarily that it looks too much like the OpenSUSE wiki (it’s really really scary how similar they look), and it’s also really difficult to read. Yes, style can be changed quite easily, but I think the focus of this demo site was solely on style.

The current state of the wiki is awful… it’s really difficult to find anything and TWiki is slow. MediaWiki is much nicer and much faster and it looks a whole lot better. So, to that end, I spent pretty much all day (besides heading outside to mow down some flowers to prepare for winter) setting up a new MediaWiki install that can be used instead of TWiki. Unlike the previous demo, my goal was not to make it look nice (although I don’t think it looks bad, and I think it looks better than the current TWiki), but I wanted to make it a logical “structure” so that it would make sense and things are laid out logically. The problem with the current TWiki is that there are no real rules to it, and no hierarchy. It, honestly, looks like the desk in my office. And, like my desk, makes it damn near impossible to find anything without a lot of effort and cussing.

Obviously it’s far from complete. The idea I have in mind is to migrate not only the developer wiki but the Mandriva Community wiki (which I also host and instigated years ago and which also went through a TWiki to MediaWiki migration) into one big “Mandriva wiki”. When I look at other distributions and their wikis, most of them look pretty good and are well laid-out. Ours is pure anarchy. And I think it reflects poorly on us. Not only that, but why on earth should we have multiple wikis (Community wiki, Developers wiki, Club wiki) when one would suffice and everyone could pool the information and talent to work on a single project? A “one-stop resource” for all things Mandriva, if you will. I suppose, as a result, that it should probably not be hosted on the “qa” machine (with Bugzilla) but on it’s own machine or, at the very least, be named “wiki.mandriva.com” instead of qa.mandriva.com/wiki/.

Ok, you’ve been in suspence long enough. You can check out what I’ve done at mdv.vmlinuz.ca. Please sign up for an account and help convert data from TWiki over to it. I’ve started, but it’s slow going… if I could devote an entire week to this, I could probably do it all on my own (I did the community wiki in 3 days). I figure if we have something in place that’s pretty close or at least on it’s way to being done, and don’t squabble over CSS and layout issues, then we have a real shot at replacing that awful TWiki.

In the end, I figure it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission, so I went ahead and started it (which seems to be something of a habit with me and web resources for Mandriva). Hopefully it’ll pan out (most of the other initiatives I’ve over the years have, so I don’t expect this one to be much different).

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Subversion, MediaWiki, and Bugzilla

March 25, 2006

Found this fantastic article about how to setup Subversion, MediaWiki, and Bugzilla to be nicely integrated. The article is really well done, and I’ve adapted most of it to the Annvix wiki and bugzilla, but the subversion integration will be a little problematic (or at least not as full as it could be) because the subversion rep is a copy of the real rep (on that server at least). My real subversion rep is on the build host so it can’t be as tightly integrated. Great article and has helped to knit three different “technologies” together a little better. Anyone who uses all three tools for their project should really take a look at it.

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