Replacing phpwiki with other wiki software

[Daniel Berlin <dberlin at dberlin dot org>]

It has gotten to the point where people are reporting bugs in our wiki
that i can't fix because the phpwiki code it too much like spaghetti.

There is one main phpwiki developer, and while he's very good at php
development, the codebase dwarfs him :).

I'm thinking of moving us to a more actively developed and supported
wiki software, such as MoinMoin or Mediawiki.

My first choice is MoinMoin, since it is very actively developed *and*
it's well architected, written in python, and easy to understand and
modify.

MediaWiki seems too abstracted and heavyweight (I'm sure you can do
anything you want with it, it just seems like massive overkill for
simple wikis)

I've converted our pages to MoinMoin, and put up the result at
http://www.dberlin.org/wiki

There is still some hand editing required that i'm doing.

The main difference in format syntax between phpwiki and moinmoin is in
bolding/italics/verbatim, and a slightly simpler list syntax.
This is actually true of phpwiki vs anything.
MoinMoin and Mediawiki use the same bolding/italic/etc format.

If we really like the old syntax better, i can try to add it.

I can actually write a simple formatter for texinfo so you can keep
texinfo pages in the wiki, edit them like you edit wiki pages, and it
will display the results as texinfo converted html.

The same is true of things like docbook, see
http://www.dberlin.org/wiki/HelpOnXmlPages


Anyhoo, unless someone has a good reason not to, i'll convert the wiki
sometimes in the next few weeks.

--Dan