History:Wiki Migration
Migration Complete
If you find any problems with the migration:
- Check the bugs list
- Consult the usual sources of help.
Thanks!
Plan for Migration to MediaWiki
Thinking aloud...
Fix up skins on mw2
Configure uploads
Document the setup on syswiki
DNS
Make sure that moin responds to "oldwiki.musicbrainz.org"
Pick a date/time, and announce it via the blog
at the time:
set moin to read only
change wikidocs to fetch from "oldwiki"
re-import everything from moin to mediawiki
change "wiki.musicbrainz.org" to point to mediawiki
post an update to the blog
and over time:
- Install http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ParserFunctions
- Fix up new wiki.
- Switch transclusion to use mediawiki
- Set DNS TTLs high again
Previous Migration from UseMod to MoinMoin
The rest of this page is historical. It explains how the Wiki was ported from UseMod to MoinMoin Wiki in July 2005, in accordance with the WikiDocsConcept.
The tool used for this saves the ported pages under the username WikiMigrationBot.
The Aim
The aim of the migration is to get the WikiDocs in a form where the WikiDocsConcept and http://wikidocs.musicbrainz.org/write/NewSiteStructure can be implemented. So:
- MoinMoin becomes our only wiki, and all UseMod wiki pages are ported to it.
- MoinMoin becomes open to all.
- A second instance of MoinMoin exists on the server to handle a ModeratedWikiMirror (or ShadowWiki).
Issues
- There still a few ImmutablePage
s that need fixing or deleting. For example, the page MoinMoin links to some pages that were deleted.
The Plan
The migration plan for the wiki is as follows:
- Announce the ported wiki to the lists, explain why we're switching from UseMod to MoinMoin, point out a page explaining the syntax differences, and ask experienced wikizens to get involved hunting down and fixing pages that link to the WikiMigrationBotReport.
- Set up an blank instance of the wiki.
- Change FrontPage to be WikiHome.
- Set bang_meta to 1 in moin_config.py (by default it is 0). This enables the use of the ! <nowiki> syntax.
- Delete all of the wiki help pages (because a user would rightly expect pages such as HelpOnEditing to concern MusicBrainz, not MoinMoin).
- There are a couple of UtilityScripts that should remedy this, namely RemovingUnwantedLanguages and Remove all pages except the system pages. --DonRedman
- Announce to the MailingLists that the wiki will be ported at a certain time, and won't be editable for (say) 2 hours.
- Make the usemod wiki read-only.
- JohnCarter runs the WikiMigrationBot script to port the bulk of the pages. There's a known bug which means a small number of pages don't get created (expected to be <10), they can port these semi-automatically (by manually copy-pasting the script's output).
- Do a quick sanity check of the ported pages
- Manually insert the UseMod vs MoinMoin syntax page. A similar page.
- Move the moinmoin wiki to wiki.musicbrainz.org (and move the usemod wiki to say, oldwiki.musicbrainz.org, just in case it's needed).
- Is it possible to set up a redirect so links to "wiki.musicbrainz.org/wiki.pl?SomeWikiPage" get redirected to "wiki.musicbrainz.org/SomeWikiPage" ? That way existing links (eg in mod notes) won't break.
Draft Announcement Email
(JohnCarter will email this to mb-users, mb-experts, mb-announce and mb-dev before the wiki is ported).
As some of you might already have heard, we will be changing our wiki enigine software from UseMod to MoinMoin. This migration is now scheduled for
<date and time>.
The wiki (http://wiki.musicbrainz.org) will be read-only for a few hours.
During this time, a script will port all of the content from the old to the new wiki engine. When the port is complete, the old UseMod wiki will be parked to oldwiki.musicbrainz.org, and we can get stuck into the new improved wiki.
Why
We're making the move because MoinMoin has various features that will allow us to integrate the editable wiki into the documentation on the main site. Indeed, the plan is that virtually all of the static documentation will be replaced by a read-only shadow of selected pages from the wiki. This will present the useful information from the wiki in a user-friendly form. See http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/wiki.pl?WikiDocs for details.
Changes
Wiki users will notice some changes when we start using MoinMoin.
MoinMoin is also stricter about the syntax that is allowed. For one thing, links or images are not allowed in titles. Unfortunately, we're currently doing this on a lot of pages.
Please Help!
Pages with syntax that MoinMoin doesn't allow have to be tidied up by hand, but the script does help. All pages that need manual fix-up link to the WikiMigrationBotReport page. Thus following the backlinks from this page (by clicking on the title) will give a list of pages that need work. There are about 160 of such pages that need manual fixing. Compare this to 63 people that registered themselves with apage, this means that if only half of us clean up five pages, then the new wiki will be in prfect shape in a very short time.
Please take some time and fix a few pages. The first thing you should do is register yourself with your old WikiName. This will allow MoinMoin to do backups of your changes and better resolve edit conflicts (if more than one person is working on a page).
Other than the syntax difference, the wiki should be treated the same as before - it's a resource for everyone to edit. If there's something in the documentation you don't understand, please add your question to the relevant page. If you see a question to which you know the answer, go ahead and answer it! If all the experienced MusicBrainz users spend a few minutes working on the wiki now and again, we'll quickly have some amazing documentation.
Future Work
The following FutureWork I'm not 100% clear on, but it's not part of the initial porting job, so that doesn't matter right now:
- Somehow priviledged users (WikiDocsModerators) can release pages to the ModeratedWikiMirror
- The mechanism that does the handles the release is clever enough to change the links so that interwiki links are created for pages that aren't in the ModeratedWikiMirror.
Discussion
Questions:
- Should all pages already in the wikidocs be marked static?
- How are we going to mark which pages are static? My idea for this is as follows:
- Priviledged users can release a page to the ModeratedWikiMirror.
- A specific version of a page is released - MoinMoin primarily uses datestamps instead of version numbers, so maybe we use that.
- Subsequent edits to the page by unpriviledged users don't appear on the ShadowWiki until the page is marked as Good by a priviledged user.
- The big question: How do we implement this?
- Unless I'm missing something, there's no easy link on the wiki back to the main site. Also, perhaps it would be nice if the wiki was more integrated in the main site, like always having the main site's side bar visible. --mfmeulenbelt