MoinMoin is a wiki engine implemented in Python, initially based on the PikiPiki wiki engine. Its name is a play on the North German greeting ''

Moin ''Moin'', ''moi'' or ''mojn'' is a Low German, Frisian, High German ( or ), Danish () and Kashubian () greeting from East Frisia, Northern Germany, the eastern and northern Netherlands, Southern Jutland in Denmark and parts of Kashubia. It ...

'', repeated as in WikiWiki. The MoinMoin code is licensed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

v2, or (at the user's option) any later version (except some 3rd party modules that are licensed under other Free Software licenses compatible with the GPL). Dozens of organizations use MoinMoin to run public

wikis A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

, including free software projects Ubuntu, Apache,

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of De ...

, and

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

. MoinMoin faces a supportability gap in 2020, based on the January 2020 deprecation of Python 2.7. The current release of Moinmoin, 1.9.11, is written in Python 2.7 and is not slated to be ported to Python 3. Moinmoin 2.0, based on Python 3.5, is not yet released (as of Aug. 2019), and "development is very slow going," according to their Python3 support page. Installation of Moinmoin 1.9.11 now yields multiple warnings of this deprecation.

Technical details

MoinMoin's storage mechanism is based on flat files and folders, rather than a

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

. This makes it easy to manipulate the content in a text editor on the server if necessary, including managing revisions if the wiki gets attacked by spammers. MoinMoin supports plug-ins and can be extended via Macros and Actions. It also uses the idea of separate

parsers Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lat ...

, ''e.g.'', for parsing the wiki syntax, and formatters, ''e.g.'', for outputting

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

code, with a SAX-like interface between the two. Therefore, to output DocBook instead of HTML, one would only need to write a docbook-formatter that implements the formatter interface, and all parsers that use the interface will automatically be supported. MoinMoin supports CamelCase linking as well as free links (non-CamelCase linking). The CamelCase is activated by default and MoinMoin does not allow disabling CamelCase links except on a one-off basis. The workaround to do this is to use a different parser but this option does not work with the

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

editor. MoinMoin also has extensive support for

access-control list In computer security, an access-control list (ACL) is a list of permissions associated with a system resource (object). An ACL specifies which users or system processes are granted access to objects, as well as what operations are allowed on giv ...

s (ACL) that greatly increase its usability in a

content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content ( content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

(CMS). It also has GUI editing capabilities. MoinMoin is able to either use a built-in search engine (rather slow, but no dependencies) or a Xapian-based indexed search engine (faster, and can also search old revisions and attached files). MoinMoin also allows synchronization of contents from instance to instanceWikiSynchronisation
from the MoinMoinWiki. via

XML-RPC XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, Edd Dumbill. (June 2001) ''Programming Web Services with XML-RPC.'' O'Reilly. First Editi ...

, and therefore allows distributed offline editing. The original MoinMoin "DesktopEdition" is significantly easier to use, because it uses a built-in Web server to display pages, requiring only Python to be installed on the host machine. Since version 1.6.0, the "DesktopEdition" has been integrated into the standard release. Also, in this release a different markup syntax was introduced, which had not been changed much since the early releases.

References

External links

*
MoinMoin Wiki GitHub organisation
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moinmoin Free wiki software Free software programmed in Python Software using the GPL license

Technical details

See also

References

External links