Online Help now using Dokuwiki

28 Apr 2008

The Programmer’s Notepad Online Help was previously run using MoinMoin, a wiki engine developed using Python and one that I was fond of many years ago. As with everything else on the internet, the help website had begun to develop a lot of spam over the last couple of months, and it would seem that MoinMoin just wasn’t up to the job of helping me to fight that.

I had to resort to regularly shelling into the server to rm -rf the page directories manually, as the web UI had nothing useful for removing several days of spam. In addition, managing the user base was a massive pain. Here’s how not to implement user control UI:

• For every user operation, require the current user to switch into the user they wish to operate on (e.g. admin has to switch to be spammer)
• Then and only then allow disabling of the spammer account
• Once disabled, log the current user out rather than return them to their own account

For each bad user, I had to login, switch users, disable account, and log in again. I am fairly sure that the spammers had a much easier job than me!

I stumbled across Dokuwiki while browsing, it looked much better maintained and cared for than MoinMoin, and much more feature-rich - the two features I was particularly looking for were Docbook export (provided via a plugin) and support for Akismet for spam catching. Akismet support was still not available from MoinMoin last I checked. Dokuwiki also has a much better look and feel than MoinMoin alongside including a reasonable web administration interface, and built-in support for syntax highlighting code.

The Online Help site has now been transitioned to Dokuwiki, maybe now would be a good time for you to take a look and maybe contribute!