MoinMoin 1.5.6 review

MoinMoin project is an easy to use, advanced and extensible WikiEngine with a large community of users. Said in a few words, it is

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Jurgen Hermann

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MoinMoin project is an easy to use, advanced and extensible WikiEngine with a large community of users.

Said in a few words, it is about collaboration on easily editable web pages.

Here are some key features of "MoinMoin":
Markup

headings (level 1-5, with and without numbering)
bold, italic, typewriter, underlined, superscript, subscript, striked
links
internal: both CamelCase and free links
external: InterWiki links, simple URLs, image URLs, links with description
horizontal rules (different widths)
tables (with some table attributes)
preformatted text
plain
colorized Python code, with or without line numbers
lists
bullet
numbered (automatically in decimal, alpha, roman)
large number of smileys and icons (see HelpOnSmileys)

Wiki base features

backups all page revisions.
Revision history shows only the last 100, all are accessible by editing the url.
page revision list
diffs between arbitrary page versions
RecentChanges
links to diffs, page info and the user home page of the editor
subpages (see HelpOnEditing/SubPages)
I18N support
Unicode support, standard encoding is utf-8
lots of help pages (see HelpContents)
RSS feed for RecentChanges
wiki page templates
configurable edit locking/warning to avoid editing conflicts
simple page storage (moin simply stores exactly what you see in the editor into a directory that is named like the page)
renaming of pages

Navigation

indexing schemes
TitleIndex
WordIndex
WantedPages
OrphanedPages
AbandonedPages
Categories (see CategoryCategory)
back links by clicking on page title
enhanced search function: title or full text search, multiple search terms, boolean expressions (1.3)
search results may be included into wiki pages via macros

Advanced Features

GUI (WYSIWYG) and text (markup) editor (1.5)
(!) large number of macros (see HelpOnMacros)
attachments (see HelpOnActions/AttachFile)
email notification, with diff included, user selectable trivial change notification
Caches bytecode-compiled versions of pages to speed up.
Theming (see HelpOnThemes)
underlay directory for storing read-only pages (system and help pages)
access control lists (see HelpOnAccessControlLists)
optional login with username and password
can reuse authentication done by web server
modular authentication makes it easy to support single-sign-on (1.5)
ReStructuredText support
Can be used to edit DocBook pages and generate DocBook from wiki markup. (1.3.5)
Some AntiSpamFeatures
Slideshows, see HelpOnSlideShows.
Twiki draw included, accessable by drawing:some_name. See OliverGraf/TWikiDrawPlugin.

Extensibility

(!) easily extensible, without changing MoinMoin code (see MoinDev/PluginConcept)
(!) written in Python! This means that you can easily read and use the source, even if you don't know Python yet.
Plugins:
actions for top level control (see ActionMarket)
macros for embedding results into wikipages (see MacroMarket)
parsers for new formats (see ParserMarket, ProcessorMarket)
Used to highlight your source code.
formatters to produce something other than HTML (see FormatterMarket)
themes (sets of code, CSS and images, see ThemeMarket)
xmlrpc

Environment

Written in Python, so it runs on:
Linux/UNIX
Windows
Mac OS X
OpenBSD
and maybe even other platforms supported by Python
simple to install
runs with:
standard CGI (Apache, IIS and others)
runs very fast with:
twisted
Apache with mod_python
Apache or lighttpd with FastCGI
built-in standalone Python http server
(!) no need for external stuff like:
diff
rcs, cvs or other
PHP
SQL or other database.

What's New in This Release:
Bugfixes:
Fix AttributeError traceback with Standalone server (if_modified_since)
Fix AttachFile "304 not modified" and redirect status code for Twisted
http auth: we now decode username and password to unicode (using config.charset == utf-8). Same for SSL client cert auth and CN.
Avoid infinite recursion in Page.parsePageLinks.
Fixed standalone server failing to shutdown if interface == "".
Now MoinMoin does not think anymore that every page links to various user homepages.
Made the irssi parser more tolerant (Thanks to "TheAnarcat").
Now multiple formatters can be used per request, the send_page code was not reentrant to this regard. Fixes "empty" search results.
Fixed problem with "=" in ImageLink macro links.
Not a moin bug, but a silly stdlib os.tempnam function made trouble to some people because it lets you override the path given in the code by setting the environment variable TMP(DIR). We now use a different function to avoid renaming trouble when TMP(DIR) points to a different file system.
Fixed antispam update on every save (Thanks to "TheAnarcat").
GUI converter: don't throw away rowclass for tables.
GUI editor formatter: allow height for table cells.
GUI editor formatter: comment texts are output using the formatter now.

New features:
Mail notifications contain a link to the diff action so the user can see the coloured difference more easily. Thanks to Tobias Polzin.
FeatureRequests/MoveAttachments - you can move attachments from one page to another (and also rename the attachment at the same time). Thanks to Reimar Bauer.
Added support for linking to attachment: and inline: URLs with ImageLink.
Added UNIX socket support for FastCGI, just set the port to some (socket) filename. Details see: MoinMoin:FeatureRequests/FastCgiUnixSocket
[[Attachlist(pagename,mimetype)]] lists attachments of pagename (default: current page) with optional mimetype restriction (default: all). Thanks to Reimar Bauer.

Other changes:
Minor performance improvements (might be noticeable if you have many custom navi_bar entries and high server load).
Avoid usage of no-cache because it breaks attachment download on IE6. This is a IE bug, not a moin bug.
Added XHTML to the unsafe list.
Changed the rst parser to be compatible to the new docutils interface for directives.
Updated EmbedObject macro.