After almost one year of development, we are pleased to announce a major upgrade focused on better user experience, international support and easier administration.

MoinMoin is a easy to use, full featured and extensiable wiki software package written in Python. It can be deployed in various enviroments from personal use, intranet, and public internet.

Major new features in this release

Much improved international support

MoinMoin is talking your language, whether it's Chinese/Taiwan, Hebrew, German or just plain English. As MoinMoin is using Unicode internally, everything can use any language: page names, user names, group names and many configuration options. ACL system is compatible with any user name or group name, including names with spaces.

Most system and help pages are translated to more than 10 languages, so any user of your wiki can read in his favourite language.

Even with right-to-left direction languages, you can mix pages of different languages in the same wiki, each page displaying in the correct direction. You can mix different languages in the same page, each section displaying in the correct direction.

Fresh look and feel

New fresh design called modern has been added as the default theme. Older rightsidebar and classic themes were improved. All themes use an improved navigation bar, integrating wiki links, user links and the current page. All themes use the new search box interface at the top of the window. Page content design was also polished for better readability.

MoinMoin has a theme plugin system, that makes it very easy to change the look-and-feel without touching any single core code line. You can customize the design by editing the stylesheets, or create totally new user interface by writing a new theme plugin in Python.

Find anything on your wiki, instantly

New search engine let you use Google-like multiple search terms. You can either search in wiki page names or on the wiki pages content. Search results are displayed in a familiar format, just like you are used to in Google, showing the context of each match.

Powerful search modifiers introduced: regular expressions, case sensitive and title search. You can apply the modifiers per search term, and compile a complete search query using boolean operators. For examples, see HelpOnSearching.

Antispam - keep spammers out

Link Spam is a major problem for wikis these days. MoinMoin has now an effective way to prevent Link Spam called Antispam. When you try to save a page, MoinMoin compares the page content against known spam patterns. If the page content matches, the page will not be saved. Spam patterns are located on BadContent page, which is automatically updated from BadContent on the MoinMaster wiki. You can add local bad content to LocalBadContent page on your wiki.

If you are hit by new Link Spam, please add it to LocalBadContent on MoinMaster wiki. It will be added soon after validation to the BadContent page, protecting all other MoinMoin wikis.

Underlay directory - easy upgrade and maintenance

Keep system and help pages out of your wiki pages directory, in the underlay directory. All pages in the underlay directory are locked for editing by Access Control List rules (ACL). In the next upgrade, simply replace your old underlay directory with a new copy and you are done.

If you want to change a system or a help page, we encourage you to do that on MoinMaster Wiki and share your changes with other MoinMoin users around the globe.

If you want to make a private edit on your underlay directory, you or any user in your wiki MoinPagesEditorGroup page can edit those pages. Edited underlay pages are automatically copied into your wiki pages directory, leaving the original page unmodified. When you visited the page, you will see the edited page.

Run with your favorite server

For a personal wiki, you can use the much improved threaded standalone server, which needs only Python and MoinMoin installed. For a high performance public wiki, use either improved Twisted server or Apache with FastCGI or mod_python. For other cases, you can still run as CGI using Apache or any other web server.

Server configuration was made simpler and more consistent. Just configure few lines and your are set to go. The default options will work out-of-the-box if you choose a standard install.

Multiconfig - easier more powerful configuration

The new multiconfig subsystem makes it easy to configure multiple wikis or wiki farms. For the simplest setup you just use a wikiconfig.py file. If you have multiple wikis, you can keep all common configuration options in your farmconfig.py. New configuration is based on Python classes. This gives you the full power of Python to create virtually any complex configuration you may need, while it still is easy to use for the common simple configuration.

Configuration files are now simpler and better organized. Most options are explained briefly in the configuration files. The default options were specially adjusted to work right out-of-the-box with little or no changes if you do a standard install.

For full changes list, read CHANGES file in the distribution.

MoinMoin history

MoinMoin has been existing since 2000. Most of its codebase was written by Jürgen Hermann while it is currently being developed by a growing team (see MoinCoreTeamGroup for the usual suspects).

Being originally based on PikiPiki, it has evolved heavily since then. Many big enterprises have been using MoinMoin as a key tool of their intranet, some even use it for their public web page. Of course there is a broad number of private installations.

More information

MoinMoin: MoinMoinRelease1.3 (last edited 2007-10-29 19:08:49 by localhost)