Wiki pre-release?

[a'moaca']

I'm to the point where I'm going to have to figure out how to organize the existing and soon-to-be-written documentation for MOSS. Much of what I currently have will remain in the tree, but certainly there should eventually be a wiki page for how to build it, FAQs, links to tarballs, etc. We'll presumably want the same for CWE, covering what we know about building, the doxygen stuff, etc. etc.

Is there any way we can stage wiki pages before release without them being public? It would be a lot easier, especially on any pages multiple people contribute to, if we can edit them in the wiki rather than having to maintain a bunch of wiki-formatted files (no word files, thank you) in random other web space.

Maybe a temporary second wiki install, worst case?

- a'moaca'

[JWPlatt]

I know of no way to secure the wiki that way, and I'd rather not implement a plugin on the main wiki to do it. Not that you're asking for that. A bare-bones temporary second wiki under a security-by-obscurity subdomain is an interesting possibility, and not much bother to set up. I probably could password access through cpanel. I'll do this if rarified says that a secure wiki on the project on Foundry is not possible. JIRA (or maybe it's Confluence) has a wiki. Let's see what he says first, then I'll set up a second wiki if rarified says it can't be done on JIRA, and Mac_Fife has nothing to suggest.

I'll add that anything that needs to be secure *and* should be unveiled coincident with Cyan's announcement, I can post for anyone who might not be able to be around at that moment. That said, it looks like we have the luxury of timing things so *everyone* can be available.

[JWPlatt]

By the way, this is a great idea. Thanks! We are all going to have the same problem soon, working on various texts where we can all help prepare them for the public launch.

Collaborative tools - what a concept.

[Mac_Fife]

This is a problem I've been thinking about for myself. I probably wasn't thinking "bigger picture" and that other people would face the same issue, or I'd have posted my thoughts

Putting anything into the main wiki, even using an obscure or custom namespace will expose it to public view via the Recent Changes page. Nothing you can do about that (there is a very long winded way of hiding pages via group permissions, but it's not a maintainable option). Mediawiki advice on extensions to do selective page hiding is that they're potentially leaky as MW just isn't designed for that kind of use. If these were to be permanently restricted articles, then setting up a second wiki on a shared database with interwiki links would be the way to go, but these are only things we want to park until we're ready.

Setting up a second wiki might still be a usable option since there are page export and import options available (although only wiki admins can use the import tool). I have the luxury another wiki available to me, configured near identically to the OpenUru one, to "experiment" on, but my approach to temporarily hidden pages was going to much more low-tech: Use a text editor and the Preview feature.

Everyone has a "User" page (if you're logged in, click on your user name at the top of the wiki page) and related "Talk" page that you can use as scratch pads. You can build up a page there and preview it (don't save it) and then copy the edit box contents to a text editor to save offline. Then, when the time to publish comes, simply create the relevant page titles in the "normal" wiki space and paste in your stored page content.

The only snag with this is that any links to other new pages can't be checked until all the pages are in place. You'd have the same issue with a second wiki though due to the different format needed for "external" links vs "internal" links.

Any images needed in wiki articles will need to be pre-loaded into the assets folders, but I don't think that would represent much of a security risk, if nothing browsable points to the files.

[rarified]

Just catching up. I'd be happy to try confluence here; I've practically zero experience in
setting up Wiki's from scratch. Confluence sounds like it would run pretty much out of the box.

JW -- did you get a lic for it?

_R

[rarified]

BTW, I'm still trying to find out what happened or is happening to the bandwidth upgrade to the Foundry. Last update I received was thursday when the small business rep said he was escalating things to his supervisor since the field service supervisor stopped answering his queries. I do want to know what can/will happen by the end of week, even if it is only scheduled by then. I'm about to start asking the local cable carrier (the only other game in town) about establishing month-to-month service to tide things over, if need be.

Sorry if the bottleneck is creating difficulties for any of you.


_R

[JWPlatt]

Yes, I got licenses for everything.

My thinking on the Foundry wiki is that I don't want to short-circuit the public wiki, so I've held off on the idea of implementing a Confluence wiki on Foundry. I'd like the public wiki to get all the effort so people would not have to visit two places on the same domain to search for information. If it doesn't take too much of your time, rarified, go ahead and try it. But let's see if we can agree that its use would be an alternative for strictly confidential work. In the future, projects would need to make their case. New age production work could be one such case.

So if it takes minutes, not days, try to prepare a wiki attached to CWE permissions on Foundry. Your time and resources are already extremely generous. If it's a bother, I'd rather set up a passworded subdomain with a temporary wiki. But hey, if you're enjoying yourself, who am I to argue with that. In any case, we can then cut/paste the final copy to the public wiki when it's time, and fix any page links at that time. I would enable file uploads to make it easy to embed your graphics without waiting on me to do it, then copy them over to assets and also fix those links when it's time. I wouldn't expect the link fixes to text and graphics to be all that extensive or difficult. Current page names, without all the text, could be recreated as dummies on the temp wiki to hold the links.

[rarified]

A temporary Confluence wiki has been set up at https://foundry.OpenUru.org/wiki. Everyone on this group should be set up to create/delete/whatever content.

Mac, tell me if you want me to install the Universal Wiki Importing tool to grab something from the OU wiki. Right now it's very basic, with an empty CWE top level page.

_R

[JWPlatt]

Thank you, rarified!

This will be a good immediate collaborative tool if everyone finds it easy to use. We'll be able to see and compare where we're all at while working on documentation, announcements, etc.

We do need to look at markup compatibility to make sure it can be transferred directly to Mediawiki later. This will get us going at least, but if it turns out the markup is very different, it will probably still be necessary to stage it over to a temporary Mediawiki. Let's see how beneficial it turns out and what we all find. If we do end up staging it, I'll do the staging work just so no one is afraid of doing something twice.

[JWPlatt]

a'moaca', when you know how the Confluence wiki works for you, please let us know. If it works, great. If not, I'll give us all a new Mediawiki instance.