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

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

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 a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

, including free software projects

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

Debian Debian () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...

, and

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

. 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 November 2023), 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 or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

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

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

code, with a SAX-like interface between the two. Therefore, to output

DocBook DocBook is a Semantics (computer science), semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software, but it can be used for any other sort of docume ...

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, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

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 or facility). An ACL specifies which users or system processes are granted access to resources, as well as what operations are al ...

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 Edition. ...

, 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 GNU General Public License

Technical details

See also

References

External links