

Modernizing MediaWiki with libraries - bd808
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/29/modernizing-mediawiki-with-libraries/

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SwellJoe
I've recently launched a wiki based on MediaWiki, which is the first
deployment of MediaWiki I've done in about a decade. I have been really
impressed. They've got technical debt, sure, but they're doing an excellent
job paying it down, and moving forward without ever throwing away the whole
project and starting over. I spent a lot of time evaluating wikis before
relaunching this one (it was running on TWiki for years, on DokuWiki before
that, and was a static site generated from DocBook XML or DocBook SGML before
that), and was surprised to find MediaWiki was such a clear winner.

I probably shouldn't have been surprised, given the resources behind it and
the size of it's userbase, but I still had notions that it would be like the
MediaWiki of old: Slapped together rapidly, always barely ahead of the demands
of WikiPedia and never having time to clean up and fix the warts.

I wrote a simple module for it, as well as an importer (using existing
libraries to go from TWiki to MediaWiki markup, but we had some complexity
coming over from such an old/large wiki), and found it really nice to work
with. I don't like that it stores content in the database, rather than on the
filesystem, but they provide such a nice import/export tool that I forgave
them. And, performance is good; at least as good as the TWiki it replaced
(which was also sufficiently fast), and much faster than some of the other
similarly busy sites I maintain (this site gets about 60,000 visitors a month
and a couple hundred thousand pageviews, and runs on a modest 4GB VM alongside
several other sites).

In short, MediaWiki is a great example of an old project aging very
gracefully. I'm happy to be working with it again. I'd become frustrated with
wikis after several painful upgrades of TWiki that kept breaking things
further and further until the site was barely functional Likewise, while
DokuWiki and MoinMoin were great tools and I've used them to good effect a
number of times, they haven't really seen the kind of advancements MediaWiki
has had.

