New Website for opengroupware.org project

Hello @all,

I would like to invite everyone to join a discussion on how the current 
website (information and documentation) could be improved.
The inspiration of this effort came during a meeting between Helge and 
me on the LinuxTag in Karlsruhe (Germany) on Saturday.

First I would like to name some of the problems with the current website:
1. Difficult to maintain. Helge told me that it takes up to one hour 
until modifications are online, due to the design of the current system 
(pages are hosted in a svn).
2. Maintainence through community is difficult, because of 1
3. Documentation Plone doesn't seem to work properly, due to database 
problems (indexes need to be rebuilded sometimes)
4. Not one website with all the information and one search function

To solve these problems I came up with the idea to setup a Wiki, which 
could contain different sections for inforamtion, documentation, 
development and the other parts, would provide an easy way to add 
information and give everyone the chance to contribute his two pence in 
an easy way. Helge and Jens MÃŒnster (Skyrix) liked the idea and you 
hopefully too.


As I am using a TWiki (http://www.twiki.org/) in an intranet my first 
thoughts came to this system, but I am not sure if it can take the load 
of the ogo homepage because of the following:
- On my machine (P2, 233Mhz, 96MB RAM) it takes around 10 secs to 
calculate a page. Ok the machine is very old, but it shouldn't take that 
long anyhow.
- The Twiki sucess stories only lists companies which are useing the 
system with a few hundred users on the intranet. No one with a few 
thausand (ogo has 3000 users in the plone at the moment).
- I am not sure if a squid proxy could bring the load down, because each 
page is generated dependig on the users preferences. Ok squid would help 
for the people which are not logged in and are browsing as guest users.
- In c't 2003/25 page 202 (german computer magazine) is a test of a few 
wiki engines and they also named scalability and search speed as one of 
the drawbacks of Twiki.

On the other hand it has really nice features:
- It is filesystem based (RCS), which makes it really easy to maintain 
(and timeconsumeing to search)
- It is skinnable (well most wikis are), but it  can have different 
skins (or only colours) for different categories, like it is realized on 
the ogo website.
- It has many plugins, just to name some usefully for ogo homepage:
  * BugzillaLinkPlugin: This plugin is useful to display links to 
bugzilla bugs.
  * BugzillaQueryPlugin: This plugin is useful to display links or data 
results from Bugzilla.
  * CommentPlugin: Allows users to quickly post comments to a page 
without an edit/preview/save cycle.
  * NewsPlugin: %NEWS% generates a short headlines topic from a list of news
  * NotificationPlugin: Immediate notifications are send every time 
somebody changed the requested topic,
  * UpdateInfoPlugin: Add a %ISNEW% tag after a WikiWord to indicate 
whether a topic has been created or updated recently

A little presentaion on Twiki can be found here: 
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiPresentation17Feb2005


The alternative I thought of is the Mediawiki 
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_feature_list) because it is 
the wiki system from the Wikipedia project.
- For sure it is skinable 
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_user_styles , Howto: 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_styles), but I am not certain if we 
could handle different styles for the different sections of the 
opengroupware homepage.
- Has proven that is really fast and rockstable for a large number of users
- Support for multiple languages
- Interlanguage links: handy method for linking articles between wikis 
in different languages (each language requires its own database)
- UTF-8 support
- Message notification (user gets a "You have new messages" notice if 
someone else has edited their user discussion page); this also works for 
anonymous users
- Output caching: complete page output can be optionally saved as static 
HTML files for serving to other clients; support for Squid proxies
- Talk pages: Each user (including every anonymous user) and every 
article has an associated page where messages can be left. These are 
separate namespaces (see above), "Talk:" and "User talk:".
- All revisions of an article are stored (optionally compressed)
- RSS syndication available for many special pages, such as 
Special:Newpages and Special:Recentchanges
- Different rights for anonymous users, signed in users, sysops, 
bureaucrats and developers.
- It also has some anti spam features 
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_Features) and as wikipedia has 
no spam problem I don't think we would get one.

Disadvantages are:
- It has only an mysql backend, which brings up a backup problem.
- Different skins are probably not possible, as mentioned before.
- No support to create tables in wiki syntax, needs to use HTML.

The featurelist can be found here: 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_feature_list
Syntaxinfo can be found here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing


There are many other wikis out there and some of them might be useable 
with many users (KDE Wiki uses at http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php the 
TikiWiki system), so if there are systems from which you think they 
should also thought off, please bring them up.

*And finally I would like to invite everyone to bring in his/her 
experiences with (dfifferent) wiki systems, that we can come to a well 
made decison.*

Regards,
Mario Minati

-- 
OpenGroupware.org Discussion [email protected]
http://mail.opengroupware.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss