Recommendations for a Ruby Wiki, preferably with bidi support?

[Alder Green]

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

 

[James Britt]

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

http://www.wikimatrix.org/

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

 

[Alder Green]

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.

http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:lang:he
http://hebdokuwiki.berlios.de/dokuwiki-2006-03-09e/doku.php

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

http://www.wikimatrix.org/

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

 

[eden li]

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.

 

[Alder Green]

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

 

[David Balmain]

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

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.

 

[James Britt]

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

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

http://www.rubyaz.org - Hacking in the Desert
http://www.artima.com/rubycs/ - The Journal By & For Rubyists
http://www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff
http://www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys

 

[Bret Pettichord]

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.

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

 

[Matt Lawrence]

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 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.

 

[Joel VanderWerf]

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

 

[James Britt]

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

 

[Alder Green]

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

 

[visenger]

Hello Alder,

did you tried Pandora?

http://pandora.rubyveil.com/pandora/Pandora/Introduction/Pandora

Cheers,
Larysa

 

[zoat]

.......and what about Hiki wiki:
http://hikiwiki.org/en/

 

[Matt Lawrence]

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 requirements.

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.

 

[Bil Kleb]

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,

 

[Matt Lawrence]

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.)

Any suggestion on the best way to add some type of login and
authentication?

-- matt
It's not what I know that counts.
It's what I can remember in time to use.

 

[Rick DeNatale]

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.

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.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

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.

Hieraki?

 

[Alder Green]

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)?