I've built a personal home page and a company web site and both times I built applications (first in Perl, second in Python) that I used to generate the HTML pages. Both of these contained different sub-sets of the functionality of MoinMoin such as:

The main difference from MoinMoin is that I've been writing my structured text (and embedding HTML) in my favourite text editor (instead of a HTML form) and generated static HTML.

I've toyed with the idea of using MoinMoin for all of my new web site, and protect it so that only I can edit files, but I would like to be able to for instance embed arbitrary HTML, and it seems a little wasteful to run cgi-scripts on every access when the content is really static. I also have slightly different ideas on navigation, headers adapting to the current page etc.

So, MoinMoin itself is not a perfect fit, but large parts of it is. I don't know if this is what the ongoing redesign is about, but I would love to be able to use:

without the Wiki things. I just want to be able to make static pages with the above convenience.

The refactoring will enable these things, or at least make them much easier. Creation of static pages can be done by writing a different "driver" script. Note that the current (current == in CVS) moin.cgi is just this:

from MoinMoin import cgimain
cgimain.run()

I'll also add a way to export XML, which in turn will be implemented by using the Formatter/Writer interface, or a similar mechanism. And where's a HTML and a XML writer, there can be more... :)

There are three point in my arguing here:

The obvious downside is that the purpose of the project will be less focused. I think it's worth that complication--even if one should perhaps not underestimate that problem.

This can be solved by providing the necessary interfaces to plug extension stuff in (extend the core), or add said "driver" scripts (use the core, from the outside). Or both, in combination.

ModularizeForReuse (last edited 2008-06-26 09:59:55 by anonymous)