Over the weekend I upgraded my wiki to MoinMoin 1.6.2.

I also finally installed modwsgi. This is what the cool kids use run their Python web apps with these days. Unlike modpython which runs a Python interpreter in each Apache instance and chews up lots of memory, modwsgi launches separate daemons to handle MoinMoin’s Python requests. And a bonus is these daemons can run as any user, no longer are my wiki files owned by the Apache user. Was easy to set up too.

MoinMoin has many powerful features in addition to just normal wiki collborative editing:

• A GUI editor: for those who can’t be bothered with wiki syntax.
• Also supports WikiCreole. The new “common-tounge” wiki syntax.
• Wiki synchronization: I can work offline on my laptop and sync it up later.
• Access Control: Yes there’s parts of my wiki which are private.
• With ACLs I can limit the actions of different users/groups on certain pages or a whole hierarchy of pages.
• Themeable: You might notice my theme is quite different to the default MoinMoin theme.
• Several antispam measures (BadContent, timeouts, captchas, host blocking). Spam hasn’t been a problem.
• Hideable inline comments and discussion subpages. I’m not using these, but they are very important for some users.
• A large number of built in macros, with more macros available from the MacroMarket
• and it is easy to code your own Macros if you know a little bit of Python.
• Pluggable authentication methods: planning to change to a Wordpress/MoinMoin single-sign-on.
• Wiki Farms: managing a group of MoinMoin wikis with common configuration.
• Smilies : planning to standardize my Wordpress and MoinMoin smilies.
• Syntax highlighting: for code.
• PDF creation.
• Email notification of wiki changes
• and more

With its access controls and macros MoinMoin almost crosses over into being a content management system. My ToDo list is a very simple example of using the FullSearch and NewPage macros to create a task tracker.

MoinMoin is used for some very popular wikis: Apache, Brewiki, Skype, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gnome, Xen, Bazaar, Mercurial.

MoinMoin is though somewhat overshadowed by the MediaWiki engine. MediaWiki is designed specifically for running Wikipedia, whereas MoinMoin is more flexible and general purpose, but isn’t going to be great at hosting multi-terabytes of extremely popular data.

There’s so many different wiki engines now, there is a WikiMatrix tool which lets you compare them side by side. Checkboxes of course can’t tell you everything. And I’m not sure their choice of checkboxes is completely unbiased.