We are going to deploy a Wiki system for a medium load website. Any
recommended Ruby options?
The Wiki doesn't have to be feature-rich. It can be simple, but should
be elegant and easily extendable, as the people who are going to use
it are mostly hackers.
The only special requirement is that it would have decent bidi support
(for Hebrew pages). But if you know a good Wiki codebase answering the
above description, we might extend it to support bidi by ourselves.
Cheers,
-Alder
Alder Green wrote:
We are going to deploy a Wiki system for a medium load website. Any
recommended Ruby options?The Wiki doesn't have to be feature-rich. It can be simple, but should
be elegant and easily extendable, as the people who are going to use
it are mostly hackers.The only special requirement is that it would have decent bidi support
(for Hebrew pages). But if you know a good Wiki codebase answering the
above description, we might extend it to support bidi by ourselves.
Is there a particular need to have it written in Ruby?
I was looking about for a robust Wiki some months ago, and would have prefered to use a Ruby app for ease of hacking, but the Wiki features were more important.
I ended up with Dokuwiki, a PHP app. It's quite good. I believe it supports Hebrew.
http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:lang:he
http://hebdokuwiki.berlios.de/dokuwiki-2006-03-09e/doku.php
You might want to look at
http://www.lifeclever.com/2006/10/19/want-your-own-wiki/
which links to
There's a 'Wiki Choice Wizard' that could be very helpful. (Though they seem to think Ruby and Rails are two different languages.)
--
James Britt
"Trying to port the desktop metaphor to the Web is like working
on how to fuel your car with hay because that is what horses eat."
- Dare Obasanjo
Hello Alder,
did you tried Pandora?
http://pandora.rubyveil.com/pandora/Pandora/Introduction/Pandora
Cheers,
Larysa
Alder Green wrote:
We are going to deploy a Wiki system for a medium load website. Any
recommended Ruby options?The Wiki doesn't have to be feature-rich. It can be simple, but should
be elegant and easily extendable, as the people who are going to use
it are mostly hackers.The only special requirement is that it would have decent bidi support
(for Hebrew pages). But if you know a good Wiki codebase answering the
above description, we might extend it to support bidi by ourselves.Cheers,
-Alder
On 10/22/06, James Britt
Is there a particular need to have it written in Ruby?
No, it's just my personal preference.
I was looking about for a robust Wiki some months ago, and would have
prefered to use a Ruby app for ease of hacking, but the Wiki features
were more important.I ended up with Dokuwiki, a PHP app. It's quite good. I believe it
supports Hebrew.
Thanks, I'll check it out.
You might want to look at
http://www.lifeclever.com/2006/10/19/want-your-own-wiki/
which links to
There's a 'Wiki Choice Wizard' that could be very helpful. (Though they
seem to think Ruby and Rails are two different languages.)
Excellent website! You just saved me hours of searching.
I went through the wizard and apparently a Ruby Wiki called Instiki -
http://instiki.rubyforge.org/ - is claimed to fit my requirements. Any
special reason you didn't use it? Is it not robust, or complex, or
not easily extendable?
-Alder
It doesn't seem to have good spam protection. You can see evidence of
this on the RoR wiki which is constantly vandalized. It seems like it
would be pretty easy to throw a captcha on it somehow though. Although
in your case it sounds like this might not be a problem.
On Oct 22, 11:04 pm, "Alder Green" <alder.gr...@gmail.com> wrote:
I went through the wizard and apparently a Ruby Wiki called Instiki -http://instiki.rubyforge.org/- is claimed to fit my requirements. Any
special reason you didn't use it? Is it not robust, or complex, or
not easily extendable?-Alder
Alder Green wrote:
Excellent website! You just saved me hours of searching.
I went through the wizard and apparently a Ruby Wiki called Instiki -
http://instiki.rubyforge.org/ - is claimed to fit my requirements. Any
special reason you didn't use it? Is it not robust, or complex, or
not easily extendable?
I don't recall exactly, but my main requirements were plain text data storage and some sort of ACL or robust spam filtering option. (And I had tried Instiki once before and it just didn't float my boat. Maybe it's changed. But see note below.)
Basically, the feature set of Dokuwiki was too compelling.
Also, see
"As of October 12, 2006, Instiki does not appear to be under active development anymore, and its own website has not been functional for some time."
The rubyforge page looks out of date, and instiki.org wouldn't come up for me.
--
James Britt
http://www.rubyaz.org - Hacking in the Desert
Ruby Code & Style - The Journal By & For Rubyists
http://www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff
http://www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys
I tried to install Instiki last summer. It is no longer simple to install, it now requires a back end database server.
-- Matt
It's not what I know that counts. It's what I can remember in time to use.
On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, Alder Green wrote:
I went through the wizard and apparently a Ruby Wiki called Instiki -
http://instiki.rubyforge.org/ - is claimed to fit my requirements. Any
special reason you didn't use it? Is it not robust, or complex, or
not easily extendable?
Excuse my ignorance, but what sort of effective SPAM protection
schemes are there for Wikis? And which Wikis have successfully
employed such schemes?
It's been a while since I extensively participated in a Wiki, but back
then, the only effective SPAM protection was requiring all
contributors to register and login.
-Alder
On 10/22/06, eden li <eden.li@gmail.com> wrote:
It doesn't seem to have good spam protection. You can see evidence of
this on the RoR wiki which is constantly vandalized. It seems like it
would be pretty easy to throw a captcha on it somehow though. Although
in your case it sounds like this might not be a problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instiki
"As of October 12, 2006, Instiki does not appear to be under active
development anymore, and its own website has not been functional for
some time."The rubyforge page looks out of date, and instiki.org wouldn't come up
for me.
--
James Britt
I recently selected Pimki as a personal wiki. I wanted a Ruby-based
wiki that supported textile. I also wanted to use it store my personal
notes and todo-lists. Pimki is a version of Instiki that also supports
the "todo:" tag much as it is supported by Eclipse for Ruby code. (The
todo items are extracted from all the pages and served a special todo
page.)
I also spoke with Alexey Verkhovsky, the maintainer of Instiki. His
public email account was overloaded with spam, and the instiki website
was taken down, i presume, because it was overloaded with wiki spam.
But he is still working on it. If you look at svn.instiki.org, you will
several commits in September.
I'm using version "2.0" of Pimki. Namely this:
pimki.rubyforge.org/pimki-2.0.zip. These is also a branch of Pimki
called 2.0 zombie, but i think it is different (not sure). I have
reported some minor problems with it and received prompt replies from
Assaph Mehr, the maintainer of Pimki.
Both projects seem to be struggling with the backend technology.
Instiki used Madeliene. One of the great things about this was that it
made instiki a two step install on Windows and often a one-step install
on Mac and Linux (when ruby was already installed).
Apparently, Madeleine has stability problems and both projects have,
separately been moving to use different, more SQL based backend
technology. But this signficantly complicates the install.
Anyhow, i'm using a version of Pimki that still uses Madeleine and i am
happy with it. I try to install the newer versions of both tools, but
found the complications involved not worth the trouble.
I'd love to see some more community organize around one of these tools,
help resolve the issues with persistence, and make the wiki technology
easier to extend without forking. Since this is a Rails-based wiki, i
would think that there would be a lot of interest and knowledge that
could be brought to bear.
Bret
Lead Developer, Watir
See here,
http://wikis.onestepback.org/Ruse/page/show/AntiSpamMeasures
Unfortunately Ruse isn't yet available as far as I know. I'm looking
forward to its release.
On 10/23/06, Alder Green <alder.green@gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/22/06, eden li <eden.li@gmail.com> wrote:
> It doesn't seem to have good spam protection. You can see evidence of
> this on the RoR wiki which is constantly vandalized. It seems like it
> would be pretty easy to throw a captcha on it somehow though. Although
> in your case it sounds like this might not be a problem.Excuse my ignorance, but what sort of effective SPAM protection
schemes are there for Wikis? And which Wikis have successfully
employed such schemes?It's been a while since I extensively participated in a Wiki, but back
then, the only effective SPAM protection was requiring all
contributors to register and login.-Alder
--
Dave Balmain
http://www.davebalmain.com/
Bret Pettichord wrote:
Both projects seem to be struggling with the backend technology.
Instiki used Madeliene. One of the great things about this was that it
made instiki a two step install on Windows and often a one-step install
on Mac and Linux (when ruby was already installed).Apparently, Madeleine has stability problems and both projects have,
separately been moving to use different, more SQL based backend
technology. But this signficantly complicates the install.Anyhow, i'm using a version of Pimki that still uses Madeleine and i am
happy with it. I try to install the newer versions of both tools, but
found the complications involved not worth the trouble.I'd love to see some more community organize around one of these tools,
help resolve the issues with persistence, and make the wiki technology
easier to extend without forking. Since this is a Rails-based wiki, i
would think that there would be a lot of interest and knowledge that
could be brought to bear.
If I were developing a wiki, I'd try using something like my FSDB[1] lib (or maybe KirbyBase[2], which I don't know well), which uses the file system for persistence, and is pure ruby. Then you can use whatever revision control system you want on those files (the file granularity is small and controllable), and the same goes for backups, journaling, indexing, etc. And at the end of the proverbial day what you've got on disk is a file hierarchy of wiki entries (plus heterogeneously formatted files, if you want) which can survive the toolset you used to access them.
The limitations[3] of Madeleine always scared me off.
[1] http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/fsdb
[2] http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/kirbybase
[3] http://madeleine.rubyforge.org/docs/designRules.html
A minor irony: the synopsis for fsdb uses the string "A la recherche du temps perdu" in an example. This was never intended as a reference to Madeleine, I promise 
--
vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407
Joel VanderWerf wrote:
If I were developing a wiki, I'd try using something like my FSDB[1] lib (or maybe KirbyBase[2], which I don't know well), which uses the file system for persistence, and is pure ruby.
I recently built a app the lead me to create a lightweight MVC Web framework using Og+Kirbybase.
Very nice combination, and Kirbybase makes it easy to manipulate/recover/inspect the data using ssh and vi, if need be.
But fsdb looks really good; I have to try that next.
--
James Britt
"In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly
universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by
uncertainty cannot be the truth."
- R. Feynman
I believe that Instiki is moving towards SQLite and Pimki is moving to
KirbyBase.
Bret
On 10/22/06, Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@path.berkeley.edu> wrote:
If I were developing a wiki, I'd try using something like my FSDB[1] lib
(or maybe KirbyBase[2], which I don't know well), which uses the file
system for persistence, and is pure ruby. Then you can use whatever
revision control system you want on those files (the file granularity is
small and controllable), and the same goes for backups, journaling,
indexing, etc. And at the end of the proverbial day what you've got on
disk is a file hierarchy of wiki entries (plus heterogeneously formatted
files, if you want) which can survive the toolset you used to access them.
Thanks everyone for the information.
My conclusion is that currently there is no compelling Ruby Wiki solution.
Instiki has too few active developers (only one, apparently?). Pimki
is similarly afflicted.
Though I greatly prefer Ruby as a technology, I can't commit to a
system that has such a tiny developer - and accordingly also user -
communities.
It's a shame that there is no attractive Ruby Wiki. I guess the reason
is that PHP already had several mature, advanced Wikis (as well as
CMSes, BBs..), with large communities of active developers, when Ruby
started to become popular.
My next step is to investigate non-Ruby Wikis, with Dokuwiki being the
first, as it was recommended by James and seems to fit my (rather
humble 
requirements.
-Alder
......and what about Hiki wiki:
http://hikiwiki.org/en/
Alder Green wrote:
Thanks everyone for the information.
My conclusion is that currently there is no compelling Ruby Wiki solution.
Instiki has too few active developers (only one, apparently?). Pimki
is similarly afflicted.Though I greatly prefer Ruby as a technology, I can't commit to a
system that has such a tiny developer - and accordingly also user -
communities.It's a shame that there is no attractive Ruby Wiki. I guess the reason
is that PHP already had several mature, advanced Wikis (as well as
CMSes, BBs..), with large communities of active developers, when Ruby
started to become popular.My next step is to investigate non-Ruby Wikis, with Dokuwiki being the
first, as it was recommended by James and seems to fit my (rather
humblerequirements.
-Alder
It's a shame that there is no attractive Ruby Wiki. I guess the reason
is that PHP already had several mature, advanced Wikis (as well as
CMSes, BBs..), with large communities of active developers, when Ruby
started to become popular.
I have used Soks with great success. Very easy to install and run, but not tremendously featureful. I highly recommend it for cases where it does enough.
My next step is to investigate non-Ruby Wikis, with Dokuwiki being the
first, as it was recommended by James and seems to fit my (rather
humble
Please let me know what you find out, I need to set up a wiki at work.
-- Matt
It's not what I know that counts. It's what I can remember in time to use.
On Tue, 24 Oct 2006, Alder Green wrote:
You might have a look at mediawiki. It's quite full-functioned (it's
what runs wikipedia). For PHP code it's also quite well structured.
The one thing which some find lacking in mediawiki is a sophisticated
permissions system. But folks looking for that should probably be
looking at a CMS rather than a wiki. You can set up mediawiki to
require registration before editing, and there are a few roles for
administration vs. contributors.
On 10/23/06, Alder Green <alder.green@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks everyone for the information.
My conclusion is that currently there is no compelling Ruby Wiki solution.
Instiki has too few active developers (only one, apparently?). Pimki
is similarly afflicted.Though I greatly prefer Ruby as a technology, I can't commit to a
system that has such a tiny developer - and accordingly also user -
communities.It's a shame that there is no attractive Ruby Wiki. I guess the reason
is that PHP already had several mature, advanced Wikis (as well as
CMSes, BBs..), with large communities of active developers, when Ruby
started to become popular.My next step is to investigate non-Ruby Wikis, with Dokuwiki being the
first, as it was recommended by James and seems to fit my (rather
humble
--
Rick DeNatale
My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/
Matt Lawrence wrote:
I have used Soks with great success. Very easy to install and run, but not tremendously featureful. I highly recommend it for cases where it does enough.
FWIW, internally we run a center-wide Soks wiki. We haven't
really found features lacking, except an fancy UI like writely
or writeboard. (People get confused when they hit 'edit'
and are greeted by Textile.)
Later,
--
Bil Kleb
http://fun3d.larc.nasa.gov
Rick DeNatale wrote:
On 10/23/06, Alder Green <alder.green@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks everyone for the information.
My conclusion is that currently there is no compelling Ruby Wiki
solution.Instiki has too few active developers (only one, apparently?). Pimki
is similarly afflicted.Though I greatly prefer Ruby as a technology, I can't commit to a
system that has such a tiny developer - and accordingly also user -
communities.It's a shame that there is no attractive Ruby Wiki. I guess the reason
is that PHP already had several mature, advanced Wikis (as well as
CMSes, BBs..), with large communities of active developers, when Ruby
started to become popular.My next step is to investigate non-Ruby Wikis, with Dokuwiki being the
first, as it was recommended by James and seems to fit my (rather
humbleYou might have a look at mediawiki. It's quite full-functioned (it's
what runs wikipedia). For PHP code it's also quite well structured.The one thing which some find lacking in mediawiki is a sophisticated
permissions system. But folks looking for that should probably be
looking at a CMS rather than a wiki. You can set up mediawiki to
require registration before editing, and there are a few roles for
administration vs. contributors.
Hieraki?
You might have a look at mediawiki. It's quite full-functioned (it's
what runs wikipedia).
Indeed, and apparently also the Hebrew version of Wikipedia
(he.wikipedia.org), so its Hebrew support is excellent.
For PHP code it's also quite well structured.
Good to know. Most of the people who might be willing to hack on the
Wiki code have some PHP experience. I'd much prefer Ruby, but
well-structured PHP takes out some of the sting
The one thing which some find lacking in mediawiki is a sophisticated
permissions system. But folks looking for that should probably be
looking at a CMS rather than a wiki. You can set up mediawiki to
require registration before editing, and there are a few roles for
administration vs. contributors.
Can you recommend any Wiki that has a more advanced permission system
(yet not necessarily as capable as a CMS's)?
On 10/25/06, Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@gmail.com> wrote:
--
Rick DeNataleMy blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/