sillypixie's Journal: knee deep in wiki...

Holy MediaWiki crash course!

Namespaces, Categories, Templates, Subpages...

Who knew wikis could be so complicated? It wouldn't be so fricking brutal to learn either, except Amazon has backordered the MediaWiki book I bought, so I have no choice but to read (shudder) a wiki in order to learn to use the wiki...

Bleh. It's a miracle I can find anything. There are probably other useful concepts that I just haven't been lucky enough to know to search for or to stumble across in the game of link roulette that is my attempt to learn enough to properly construct a rather large interconnected page structure...

I think what I'll end up being able to do will be cool, but getting there has been a bit of an exercise in uncertainty. I'm not sure if I'll still be a wiki hater after this, but if I am, at least I'll be a qualified wiki hater...

Update: Wow, now I understand why big wiki sites are so cool while little wiki sites always suck so much... I did not understand just what you can do with this stuff.

wikis are awesome

[nizo]

I have twiki installed at home, and I am slowly adding content into it (stuff like license info, writing stuff, code, etc). I wasn't too excited about it when I started using it a few years ago, but now I see it as a really really nice way to organize random information easily.

I really like MediaWiki

[Degrees]

On the one hand, yes, you can go hog-wild with the customization thing. On the other hand, there isn't really a whole lot of reason to complicate things. I did the namespace thing, and it was fine - but ultimately, I could have just done linked pages with consistent titles instead.

I did NOT mess with skins, as that magic is beyond my mental grasp.

What was most fun for me, was that I wrote a bunch of scripts to suck pages out of MediaWiki via ODBC calls, update the text, and then push the pages back in. I

Re:

[sillypixie]

That is similar to what I'm doing - I'm basically creating a relational model between 4 or five sets of information, some of it relatively static and some of it collaboratively updated.

Now that I'm getting the hang of it, I'm pretty impressed with what I can do. The learning curve was horrific though.

The suckiest bit will be the stuff I need to import from Wordpress tables into template calls.

Any suggestions?

Pix

 

Re:

[Degrees]

Not really - I assume you already have a favorite language you use for manipulating data. It's really just same ol' same ol': parse out the data from the source, and output it in the format you like.

The only tricky part that I had to learn, was that after writing the data back to the MySQL table, I also had to update the time stamp for the page. Without that, MediaWiki would wait until the next edit/save operation to rebuild the links between pages.

Obviously, if the Wordpress data is structured enough, th

Re:

[sillypixie]

OMG I just found DPL & DocTypes. I could cry... it's perfect...

From a content perspective, I was travelling the same path. But the formatting, sorting, and export functionality are more than I could have ever accomplished.

Re:

[Degrees]

Cool stuff - newer than what I had available to me a couple years ago.

The DocTypes stuff looks nifty. I may want to re-visit our internal documentation wiki now....