[phpMyAdmin Developers] Wiki

[Isaac Bennetch]

On 6/13/16 8:02 AM, Michal Čihař wrote:
> Hi
> 
> this topic was discussed quite a lot on the mailing list, but still I'd
> like to hear feedback which solution do you prefer.
> 
> Dne 8.6.2016 v 13:33 Michal Čihař napsal(a):
>> Possible solutions:
>>
>> * bring Mediawiki on wiki.phpmyadmin.net back to usable state
>>
>>   - we will have to handle security fixes and so on
>>   - need some way to prevent vandalism
> 
> Alec Teal offered help with this. The best approach here is probably to
> start with updating latest Mediawiki and avoid using Debian packages
> completely.

I am not against staying with Mediawiki, however the obvious shortcoming
is lack of git integration. This is not a deal-killer for me, but it is
a negative.

>> * use wiki on GitHub
>>
>>   - it's for free with the repository
>>   - the wiki is quite limited (no categories, no search, ...)
>>   - having wiki content as Git repository is great
> 
> The wiki features are rather limited here, on the other side we really
> did not use much of them anyway...

We can work around the lack of features, since there aren't many we use,
but the limitations with how data is displayed (for instance, only about
70% of the page is used for actual wiki data) make this difficult. I'm
not fond of Github wiki and only consider it because it's easy and has
great git integration.

>> * use other solution for wiki.phpmyadmin.net
>>
>>   - we could use cleaned up wiki content which is currently used on GitHub
>>   - I'd really prefer something with Git integration
>>   - preferably use GitHub authentication, so that we do not have to
>> maintain another list of users
>>   - one of possible tools to do that is ikiwiki
> 
> Anybody has experience with ikiwiki or other wiki engines?

I've been looking in to ikiwiki, actually. It has git integration, which
I think is the feature we're most looking for. The underlying language
is Markdown, which we're rather familiar with. However, the rendered
pages are a bit ugly.

You can quickly clone the repository with
> git clone git://ikiwiki.branchable.com/
to view the demo wiki. Look in the ./doc/ folder for the actual wiki
content. The rendered pages are visible at https://ikiwiki.info/

They appear to allow authentication using accounts from OpenID, Yahoo,
WordPress, and more; in fact there's a page with discussion about their
plans/roadmap for authentication[1]. However, it seems the path to
OpenID is a bumpy one[2].

I'm more excited about Gitit[3][4]. Gitit has a git backend (or darcs or
mercurial), pages are able to be written in about ten different flavors
including Markdown and reStructuredText (anything understood by Pandoc),
and it looks like Mediawiki (which isn't a big goal for me, but it's a
common and easy-to-use structure). The default/suggested authentication
seems to be GitHub OAuth. Downsides about it: their own wiki is a mess
(broken links to the Install guide and README, not a whole lot of
information in general), development seems slow (there are plenty of
Issues and Pull Requests without a comment, last commit was 12 days
ago), and it's written in Haskell (with which I'm not very familiar) --
but this is my favorite right now. This random guy[5] has similar goals
to ours and settled on Gitit.

Finally, there is Realms[6][7] and Gollum[8]. Realms is built on Gollum,
uses GitHub OAuth, and it looks really modern. However, the
documentation seems really weak and it looks like they haven't published
an actual release yet (though running their git 'master' branch seems to
work okay). Realms is very interesting to me, but with my cursory
examination it doesn't feel like production-ready software. I could be
wrong. Gollum is apparently what GitHub is using for their wiki engine.
I don't have a good sense of what Gollum is like, because as near as I
can tell they don't have a demo and I haven't gotten around to
installing it on my test machine. There's a fork to add OAuth support[9].

For looks, I think Realms acts best; it's modern and slick and easy to
use. However, Gitit seems much more established and reliable.


1 - https://ikiwiki.info/todo/emailauth/
2 - https://ikiwiki.info/plugins/openid/troubleshooting/
3 - http://gitit.net/
4 - https://github.com/jgm/gitit
5 - http://nathantypanski.com/blog/2014-07-09-personal-wiki.html
6 - http://realms.io/
7 - https://github.com/scragg0x/realms-wiki
8 - https://github.com/gollum/gollum
9 - https://github.com/aleiphoenix/gollum-with-auth