MoinMoin

MoinMoin
Developed by	Jürgen Hermann; Thomas Waldmann
Latest release	1.8.2 / 2009-02-08; 57 days ago
Operating system	Cross-platform
License	GPL
Website	MoinMoin

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For the Frisian greeting from which this software takes its name, see Moin.

This article is about the wiki software. For the Nigerian dish, see Moin moin.

MoinMoin is a wiki engine implemented in Python, initially based on the PikiPiki wiki engine. Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, MoinMoin is free software.

A number of organizations use MoinMoin to run public wikis, including notable free software projects Ubuntu, Apache, Debian, FreeBSD, and others.^[1]

[edit] Technical details

MoinMoin's storage mechanism is based on flat files and folders, rather than a database. This makes it easy to manipulate the content in a text editor on the server if necessary, including managing revisions if the wiki gets attacked by spammers. A storage abstraction layer is currently being worked on, which will allow the server administrator to select between flat file-storage or a relational database.^{[citation needed]}

MoinMoin supports plugins and can be extended via Macros and Actions. It also uses the idea of separate parsers (e.g. for parsing the wiki syntax) and formatters (e.g. for outputting HTML code) with a SAX-like interface between the two. The idea is that if you want to be able to output DocBook instead of HTML, you only need to write a docbook-formatter that implements the formatter interface, and all parsers that use the interface will automatically be supported.^{[citation needed]}

MoinMoin supports CamelCase linking as well as free links (non-CamelCase linking). The CamelCase linking is activated by default and can't be deactivated without affecting the WYSIWYG editor.^{[citation needed]}

MoinMoin also has extensive support for Access Control Lists (ACL) that greatly increase its usability in a content management system (CMS). It also has GUI editing capabilities.^{[citation needed]}

MoinMoin is able to either use a built-in search engine (rather slow, but no dependencies) or a Xapian based indexed search engine (faster, and can also search old revisions and attached files).^{[citation needed]}

MoinMoin also allows synchronization of contents from instance to instance^[2] via XML-RPC and therefore allows distributed offline editing.

The original MoinMoin "DesktopEdition" is significantly easier to use because it uses a built-in web server to display pages, requiring only Python to be installed on the host machine. Since version 1.6.0, the "DesktopEdition" has been integrated into the standard release.^{[citation needed]} Also in this release a different markup syntax was introduced, which hasn't been changed much since the early releases.^{[citation needed]}