On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 10:40:38AM +0000, Jonathan McDowell wrote:
On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 01:39:19AM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
you had enough access to make backups, but you didn't think to either.
Sam's right that the easiest (and most helpful) way to create backups was via SFTP. I am kicking myself that I wasn't doing so - we had backups on the actual hosting in case the wiki got completely trashed or went wrong during an upgrade, but unless one of the other 3 or 4 people who had access made offsites then we're a bit stuck.
I'm the one who made the choice to install Moin on the old site. I had nothing to do with organising the hosting so didn't feel able to hand out ssh access to others (I only had access because I'd been the one updating the Norwich meeting page). There was a definite lack of people actually working on the site and a wiki seemed like the best way to let anyone who had an interest get involved. I'm sorry if anyone feels it was installed just to shut them up.
I went with Moin because I have experience with it and knew it could run without too many other dependencies. I suspect the option that would have been most familiar to people would have been MediaWiki and it requires a backend database (which we had on the old hosting, but would have made it harder to move elsewhere).
As to the old boys network claim there is certainly a more active clique but the old website had been deliberately left with the sponsor rather than moved to something I controlled in order to avoid any suggestion that I might be trying to over reach.
Regarding choice of Wiki software I've been doing this (for the umpteenth time) recently and Moin was one of the front runners. However I've decided on DokuWiki for a number of reasons:-
It *looks* a whole lot better 'out of the box', Moin is distinctly geeky to look at to my mind.
Much cleaner install, much easier than Moin (which I have installed as well because I want to do fairly in depth comparison).
Continuing from the easier install adding plugins and such is easier in DokuWiki, Moin's 'markets' seem a rather odd hodge podge of things with no clear organisation.
I'm not sure about Moin but DokuWiki's data is stored in directly editable text files, it is actually set up so that if you just drop text files into the right places they will become DokuWiki pages with no further ado.
It's just a pity that Moin is the only serious Wiki contender written in my favourite language python and that DokuWiki is all PHP. Still, PHP isn't too bad to work with.