MoinMoin: MoinMoinSuccessStories

Here you can find a selection of MoinMoin success stories as they were reported to us. But there are certainly many, many more. Thus we would like to encourage you to add your personal success story here to make the list grow a bit.

If you do not want to do big descriptions, just enter a line at MoinMoinWikis (if you run a public wiki) or MoinMoinUsers (if you run a non-public wiki).

Stories

Intranet use @ WEB.DE

Wikifarm at the Apache Software Foundation

Intranet use at Waldmann EDV

Waldmann EDV uses an intranet MoinMoin wiki for all sort of notes, todo list / wiki homepages, contacts (see also PhoneDial), collecting links, time tracking, price tracking, RMA tracking, calendaring, etc.

There is no "classic" intranet as there is no need, moin does it all. Acceptance is good.

FreeBSD

I was asked to set up a Wiki for work. I did what I always do:

cd /usr/ports
make search key=wiki

I stumbled upon moinmoin.

cd www/moin
make install

That's IT. it just works (tm).

I'm not sure if this is a testament to whoever ported moin to freebsd, or to the freebsd ports system, or to freebsd itself, but setting up moinmoin on freebsd is easier then falling off a log. that is all.

Oh, I had to edit /usr/local/share/moin/cgi-bin/moin_config.py to change the sitename.

this rocks

Sam

LinuxWiki.org

We use moin at LinuxWiki and we love it so much that we are significantly contributing to its development. Using moin is easy and fun. It has a good balance between feature set and ease of use. As it is implemented in Python, even reading and hacking the code or writing plug-in extensions is fun. -- ThomasWaldmann 2004-02-20 12:55:48

JuraWiki.de

The first wiki I got to know was the LinuxWiki. I immediately was fascinated by the simplicity of the wiki concept. Because I did not find a wiki for law stuff, I contacted the operator of LinuxWiki. Fortunately it was a wiki hoster and so on the same day the JuraWiki was born. Since then it runs trouble-free and even gets better almost every day. -- RalfZosel

Nexus Wiki

Since November 2002 we are using MoinMoin as internal collobarative work platform in the research project Nexus at the Stuttgart University. With about 30 researchers of 7 different institutes (plus students) it is a quite big project (called Center of Excellence or Sonderforschungsbereich).

The problem we tried to solve was "there are n+1 possible locations for a (document|information|protocol)", where the "+1" always points to the place you didn't think of. So we gave out the direction "do everything which is not only of your interest in the wiki".

So far (07/03), it works fine. We have about 600 pages, 1.8 Mb pure text and 0.5 Gb with attachments. We do all the working group coordination (dates, protocols, work documents), software documentation of the Nexus platform, collections of related work/projects and management of ressources (hardware, rooms) and communication there. Recently, we had a project-wide colloquium where the working groups and some of the projects reported about their work in the past half year. It was amazing how often the wiki was mentioned (like in "and then we did a study of ..., and you can find the results in the wiki).

We are still working with v1.0, because I don't want to bother our sysadmin to often with updates. This is quite sufficient for our needs - but there are some features that would be nice to have:

• external edit - I saw action/ExternalEdit, but it does not work for 1.0 and it has no concurrent edits support

• document export function - It would be very handy to export chosen wiki pages to a document with a table of contents (PDF, HTML)
• auto-subscribe - we would like to subscribe another user to a page

We will keep tab on the recent development and implement some of the features (as soon as the 1.1 is released).

Since our project is about context-models for context-aware application, we deal with geographic information systems, spatial databases, mobile applications and so on. The GeoWiki is quite a cool idea - I think we will look at this closer.

Thanks for the great software. -- DanielaNicklas

PfennigSolutions: Wiki as CRM

Pfennigsolutions: We are now using a wiki as a CRM. We do this under a special page tree. We do attach all kinds of related data toa customer page. We also add notes about what we did when to a special page so that we can access the data from any place instead of having this on paper. If we need it on paper we print it out. -- ThiloPfennig 2006-11-01 12:45:11

RPG: SL Werkstatt

Some game masters (GM) (or storytellers) of role-play games do not just buy adventures and sourcebooks, but develop their own worlds and stories for their troupe. So am I. Actually, it was the first thought when my friend told me about MoinMoin - "cool, now I can easily manage my background information, plot elements and protagonists". Until then, I used MS Word for a highly hyperlinked document - urgs. So I installed a local wiki on my notebook and converted my whole SF-universe campagne into wiki-sites: categories, lists, plot descritions and a site for each planet, so I can travel through my wormhole-nexus with mouse clicks.

Some weeks later another GM asked me if he could use my background for his SF-campagne. "sure", I said, "I will do it on the web for you". And then I thought deeper: what if more GMs have a wiki together? They could share their ideas, comment each other, develop new adventures... and it is a practicable way to document your campaigne, anyway.

So I set up the "SL-Werkstatt" (game-master workshop). Is is password-protected because the GMs should be sure that their players don't come around and read what should be a suprise for them. Currently (07/03) we have about 20 GMs around there, with 15 projects - some GURPS (SF and Mecha), some Mage: the Ascension, Ars Magica, victorian Buffy and BESM (433 pages).

RPG-related features I'm thinking about:

• character-sheet processors for different systems
• ACLs with troupe-management - see also discussion on "Online-Rollenspiel Seite" in de.rec.spiele.rpg.misc (German)

As said before, even for a single GM a MoinMoin-Wiki is a great platform for managing a campaigne. But in concert, it gets even more powerful. -- DanielaNicklas

• I'm doing this for a game I run as well; using a wiki means I can work on the game even when I'm travelling without my game stuff. -- FredDrake

RPG: planning a LARP

From pen & paper to live action role play (LARP). 40 people come together for one weekend to experience a story, not only in their minds, but as real as possible - like actors in a impro-theatre.

We are currently planning a Star Trek LARP (see http://www.holo-con.de for more details). We are a team with six members, distributed over southern Germany and Austria. We have to organize players, decorations, advertising, and - most important for the fun of the players - the story. And again, a password-protected MoinMoin wiki does a great job for centralizing the information.

As a special usage here, we want to give the players a in-time information system during the play. It should look "star-trekkish" and contain data about starfleet personell, planets, technology, ... the stuff that Harry Kim gets from his console. Many trekkies has already build stylish web pages - but we are going an easy way: we paste the information into a MoinMoin wiki, do a LCARS-css over it (did somebody this already?) and put it on a terminal. Additional comfort: the players can use it for communication, too.

-- DanielaNicklas

MoinMoin as a web

I have 4 different wikis based in Moin. Two are intranets for a development team of business software. Other two are for web sites.

Now I want speak about a web site based in Moin:

http://garrafbenicarlo.com

This site is about a regata (nautical curse) and is based in Moin whitout any modification. Only changes in moin_config.py:

...
title1 = '''
<center>
    <TABLE WIDTH=100% BORDER=1 CELLPADDING=2 CELLSPACING=0>
        <TR>
                <TD WIDTH=30%>
                    <div align="center">
                    <a href="http://www.clubnauticgarraf.com" target="_blank">
                    <IMG SRC="/wiki/img/logocng.gif" NAME="Club" width=175 height=25 BORDER=0>
                    <img border="0" src="/wiki/img/flag.gif" width="36" height="25">
                    </a>
                    </div>
              </TD>
                <TD WIDTH=40% valign="middle" bgcolor="#E4E4E4">
                    <div align="center"><img border="0" src="/wiki/img/gb3.gif" width="339" height="99"></div>
                </TD>
                <TD WIDTH=30%>
                    <div align="center">
                    <a href="http://www.marinabenicarlo.com" target="_blank">
                    <IMG border="0" SRC="/wiki/img/mb.gif" NAME="Marina" width="250" height="80">
                    </a>
                    </div>
                </TD>
            </TR>
    </TABLE>
</center>
'''

page_front_page = 'Inicial'

...
navi_bar = [
        'Inicial',
        'Anunci de Regata',
        'Carta Nàutica',
        'Inscripció',
        'Gestió Inscripció',
        'Inscrits',
        'Fòrum',
        'Contactar',
        ]

Also in pages linking with external web sites I used the [[HTML()]] macro with an iframe. Text of Inscrits page is:

[[HTML(<iframe src="http://petrolera.xarxa.net/inscrits.php?classe=N" width="100%" height="600"></iframe>)]]

Moin es great! -- Pere Martinez

MoinMoin as a Quality Management System

I have just installed MoinMoin in an intranet, based on w2k Server IIS5, w2k workstations with ie6 in a medical practice for documentation of quality management issues. Installation was no problem, if I followed the installation guide word by word. After some days of adding content, it seems to serve our needs quite well. WolfgangBurr

After upgrading to v 1.5.4 (my god) we are now in the certification process for QEP. We use DesktopEdition for that purpose (works fine, thanks to AlexanderSchremmer). Wonder how the auditor will do with that stuff. I think, we are the first with no paper for the qm-handbook. --20070504 WolfgangBurr

MoinMoin at xmlBlaster.org

We use MoinMoin at xmlBlaster for our simple little 'Who Is Using' page - cool. -- MarcelRuff

Tecnología hipermedial

I use MoinMoin for a graduate course on Hypermedial communication & interaction, an annual course in the Universidad de Tres de Febrero (Buenos Aires, Argentina). In this course I use Moin since 2004 to work with students about hypertext issues and social-group construction (Alexander, thanks for your DesktopEdition). Now I'm even using it for exams, since the questions are opened to read when it starts and each student responds in a personal subpage. I can read their answers when they finish (with no more ilegible handwriting) and comment directly in-the-spot. Everybody learns from the other and I have to say things only once and link after. Simply great. :-D --EduardoMercovich

Design and Verificaton Lab, UCSC

At UC Santa Cruz, I recently decided to maintain my home page, the web pages of the classes I teach, and many internal project pages as Wikis. The idea of using Wikis for project pages is obvious. But I really fell in love with the ease of maintaining Wiki pages, compared to normal HTML pages: no more logging into servers, scp-ing files, setting permissions, and writing HTML that is becoming more and more cryptic. Who wants to bother with style sheets and logorrhoic tags if all you want to do is put up a bit of content? This is especially convenient for pages, such as class pages, that change all the time. The beauty is that the #acl mechanism of MoinMoin lets me open up selected pages, so that people can give me feedback (or post class notes, whatever). Moreover, MoinMoin has such a clean design that it was trivial to modify the code a bit, and obtain a clean-looking public page (the one you see), while maintaining an editable backdoor. --Luca

Organizing GNOME Germany Websites

The server og GNOME Germany had a major breakdown, so we had to start from scratch. I installed a Moin wiki http://gnome.wikiinfo.org/ while having a chat session with other Gnomies on IRC and we quickly put ideas and facts online. I think chat and wiki as a combination are the absolute killer application because you can get immediate feedback for what you are going to do next or ask somebody to help you at one page. Having such wiki/chat sessions weekly or so can help to get things fixed quickly and also helps people to get know each other.

A practice that I also have found to be very useful are the combination of NewPage and FullSearch macro like they are used on MoinMoinBugs. This solves two problems:

1. People get templates automatically and can be forced to have an extension to the page name (NewPage macro)

2. You get a list of specific pages that fit to a specific name space (FullSearch macro)

H1 Experiment at DESY. Hamburg

I added the success story to my user page. GerhardBrandt

Intranet in GF Piping Systems, Schaffhausen, CH: "its in the wiki!"

We are a small group of technicians (3 people) and had a lot of Word documents, databases, sheets, ... in out pool storage on the file server. - but never found what we needed.

Then i came with the idea: lets build a wiki. I had no official support from my boss, but an own server :-). And in summer 2004 i have finally decided to use moinmoin and installed it. Since then, we have ~1200 pages.

• If we need to contact somone: we find the address in the wiki
• If out boss tries to annoying us: "its in the wiki"
• If we forgot a shared password: wo look in the wiki (of course: protected by ACL)
• If we need device documentation: its in the wiki
• If we plan a new project: we write the specifications directly into the wiki
• Also there are: working schedules, journals, some kind of messages for those who are in vacation, documentation how to solve problems - or who to ask for

• And last but not least: everyone of us regularily checks RecentChanges so we are always up to date and are able to see errors in an early state

Users of the wiki: ~5 people

The main advantages compared to simple files are:

• there is no complex directory structure
• everything can be found by a fast full-text-search
• everything is versionized and its always possible to see who made which change

• the RecentChanges page is some kind of quiet communication between us (we dont see us very much)

• you would never create a word document with just 4 lines. in a wiki you will
• even for lists like a computer list oder an ip list the wiki is a good way, as long as you dont have another software doing this job

-- 2009-08-14 DanielAlder

Discussion

They actually asked you to set up a wiki for work?! I'm referring to MoinMoinSuccessStories. I've set up three and shown them to people at work. Co-workers mostly just say, "oh neat" and then never use it.

• Start to use it in your team or something, and use phrases like "it's on the wiki, could you comment on it?" At WEB.DE, we just opened a company-wide wiki in addition to those of the technical departments (but then, this took about 2 years).

  Yeah I had similar "self-crisis" problem 1 year ago, but seems that some sales personnel (those guys who live in symbiosis with Outlook and Mobile phone) finally have started to use it, and now its finally not only our tech department... As soon as fruits grow, i`ll post real success story, too

Ahem, It is on the wiki could you comment on it. How was that? I'll have to practice in front of the mirror more. Were you using moin or some other wiki at WEB.DE? I wonder how oddmuse will scale once everyone starts "commenting on what is on the wiki". Maybe I'll switch to moin.

---

Is it okay to put success stories for heavily-modified versions of moin here? I'd like to make note of how far we've gone with Davis Wiki. -- PhilipNeustrom

Sure, why not. You could maybe even join us and do coding together with us, would maybe make upgrades easier. Meet us on MoinMoinChat. -- ThomasWaldmann 2004-11-02 07:23:47