With most of the work of updating the forums done it’s now time to look at updating the wiki.
It’s currently running MediaWiki which is far too heavy/complex etc. for our needs, so I’m starting this thread as a place to discuss what we should change.
The three main options mentioned are:
Discourse
Complete integration with the forums.
Discourse has ‘wiki posts’ built in. They can be edited by any user at trust level one or higher.
We could either use existing forum categories as the main category for each page, and the tagging system for additional categories or make a wiki category and just use tags for page categorisation.
It should be pretty easy to write a small script that uses the Discourse API to render wiki pages at their existing wiki.sourceruns.org location.
Downsides are: no [[easy intra wiki links]] (could make a Discourse plugin to do that though), no table of contents, editing is done entirely seperate from the pages themselves.
Looks to be a fairly simple wiki with all the key feature we need.
Shouldn’t be too hard to integrate with the forums for authentication – wiki.js uses passport.js for auth, and there is a passport.js extension for Discourse SSO.
Downsides:
Is JavaScript running on a server
MongoDB
GitBook
Similar to wiki.js in the sense that it’s markdown files stored in git, but lacks any kind of frontend for editing, because it is built more for static documentation.
Other Options?
There are a million different platforms for running a wiki on, so definitely open to other suggestions…
I’d say the main issue with GitBook is that you’re limited to 5 contributors for each project that are able to use the editor directly in the project, anyone that wants to contribute externally/publicly would have to submit a pull request to a GitHub repository connected to the project.
Then that could be a plus depending how you look at it…
Oh cool, just checked dev, Postgres and Redis is the same as the forums, so come 2.0 release I can just make them use the same DB instances as the forum.
Also these days I don’t think Mongo is too bad, but it’s still fun to hate on.
Going to try set up a test instance and make auth work with the forums.
I vote we wait a month to see whether or not a beta arrives in that time. That way we can build a proper theme that fits in with the rest of the site design and linking logins to the forums will be much easier.
That said, migrating content across is going to take time so maybe I’ll put the test instance I set up yesterday back online so people can start migrating content, that way we can just upgrade to a 2.0 instance when we’re ready to go live.
How do I log in to the existing Wiki right now? I can’t seem to log in now that the forum is using Discourse. The “Log in” button just takes me to a 404.
I have a copy of wikijs running now. If you’d like access to begin writing pages let me know here or over Discord and I’ll set you up (Or you can write Markdown pages directly if that’s your style)
Non-existent. No one really wants to work on this, and thus it didn’t get done. I think the wiki was great in a time before Discord, but now everyone gets their info from the server.
Pretty much that. I was happy to put in the work to get a new modern wiki up but couldn’t migrate and fill in the info because I simply don’t know enough anymore.
Not quite, the wiki still sees over 12,000 visitors a month from Google (+more from other places too, though analytics has been broken so not entirely sure how many more at the moment), so thats still quite a lot of people referring to the info there.
