Open source wiki software: MoinMoin


I tried a couple; this one is a good compromise between ease of install and ease of use for my students.

I decided to use a wiki to see if that would help with my on-line resources and communication with my students. I first tried useMod, which is a single perl script, very easy to install and to set up. However, it's editor requires you to be a bit wiki-smart, which was not a desirable feature for me.

Another of my students suggested MoinMoin , a Python based wiki engine. It's a bit more involved to get installed; my first install took 7 hours, but that's because I had to (re)learn how to to set up httpd.conf on my Mac, etc., find the missing "/" symbols, blah blah blah. However, now that I've done it, I could probably do the whole install process in 15-30 minutes.

MoinMoin has some access control capabilities that can be used with or separate from Apache's htpasswd utility, and it has macros that make it fairly easy for me to have my students turn in weekly reports on their projects and then automatically link to those reports from a single page.

See the SPaRC wiki for an example.

Posted: Wed - December 27, 2006 at 08:00 AM           | |

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