Zwiki

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wiki plans

wiki plans

http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/ubuntu-traffic/u20041029_10.html

Folks that use the wiki frequently may have noticed some serious work on the wiki and some major changes. Mark Shuttleworth gave the devel list the update which explained the status with the new wiki (we're switching) plus the justifications behind this and the drawbacks that this will stick us with:

Congrats to the doc team for getting off to such a fast start, it's amazing to see it blossoming like this.

Moin was a quickstart option for us, but I'd like to make the wiki a more central part of the web site, so we are going to be switching to A wiki that is integrated with the website as of Monday.

The wiki will support the following formats:

native HTML
ReStructuredText (a very nice format)
StructuredText (not great)
Moin without tables

We will have to convert the existing tables in the (fantastic) hardware section of the wiki to HTML to ReStructuredText.

The new wiki has some glitches and gotchas that we will fund development on, but which we'll have to live with for now:

it doesn't have the same level of revision control
doesn't do Moin tables (but does native HTML and ReStructuredText tables)
preview mode is very new, so you pretty much need to get it right first time

But it has some big advantages:

it's fully integrated with the web site search, so searching on the main site will find relevant wiki pages
it inherits the full skin of the main web site

Not only that, but we will be able to give permissions for the doc team to edit FAQ's, HOWTOs, and other web site documents directly.

The new wiki will be at http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/

Steve Alexander (stevea) is responsible for the wiki code update on Monday, Brad Bollenbach (bradb) will be handling the actual execution of that. Louise McCance Price (lulu) has overall responsibility for the web site.

We'll try to big-bang it on Monday so that it Just Works, and at the same time send out a mail telling folks how to log in to the site to work on the wiki.

It will need registering in the new site, but we promise that's the last registration you'll ever need to work with the web site or any of our infrastructure, as we finally have a robust backend for it all.

In case you missed it, the key link there is http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/

The new wiki runs on zwiki. Alexander Poslavsky pointed out the following useful links on the documentation list:

http://zwiki.org/FrontPage
http://zwiki.org/QuickReference#1 (shortcuts!)
http://zwiki.org/FAQs (DTML scripting)

Simon Michael posted a nice review of the different types of markup available saying:

structured text - zwiki's "native type" - the one we use on zwiki.org, so most tested and works most smoothly with other zwiki features (comments etc.). Simple, forgiving, allows HTML when you need it, and for my money the most bang for your buck.
moin markup - very new in zwiki and will still have issues. Most of your pages use this at the moment. Moin extended link syntax, macros etc. not yet supported.
restructured text - apparently popular, well specified, good for generating pdfs etc, but fussy and complicated.
html - plain HTML plus zwiki links. Uses the epoz wysiwyg html editor if possible; most of your browsers should show this.

Your mileage will vary; I prefer ReST for example. That said, there's going to be a lot of benefit to standardizing a bit. Mark Shuttleworth has said that he still wants the default language to be Moin markup. For longer documents that the Documentation Team are working on, I think the choice will be to go with something a little more geared toward producing larger docs like ReST.