[Instiki] I2 or Instiki Rails Port

[Alexey Verkhovsky]

Alan Macdougall wrote:

> On 10/18/05, *Rich Morin* <rdm at cfcl.com <mailto:rdm at cfcl.com>> wrote:
>
>     Is there a way to load Instiki wikis into Instiki-AR and/or i2?
>
>
> Yes. I spent quite some time tinkering on both a couple weeks ago. [By 
> way of background, I'm a user, not a programmer...]
>
> i2 has an import script, which traverses the exported textile files 
> from your old instiki install. However, as you may have seen with the 
> Ruby On Rails wiki, it's not quite ready for prime time yet: existing 
> wikilinks get broken (as i2 does not at all use CamelCase) and in my 
> experience screwed up links that had been created using [[ ]] syntax.
>
> Meanwhile, instiki-ar has a somewhat nicer import script that runs 
> over the latest madeleine snapshot; the only problems I've had is that 
> I seem to end up with a whole lot of "orphanned" pages that aren't 
> actually orphans.
>
> I've managed to get both i2 and instiki-ar running on an Sqlite 
> backend: both seem to go quite well, just very slightly slower on my 
> iBook than instiki itself (n.b. there's a gotcha with Sqlite3 on 
> MacOSX: you need to get an install of SWIG (?) or use Sqlite2 - well 
> documented on the RoR wiki). Both run similarly on my WinXP box. I've 
> also tried instiki-ar on WinXP using a MySQL backend - it ran very 
> smoothly there too. However, i2's caching of pages means it runs like 
> stink ( i.e., very fast) on any page that you've previously visited. 
>
> I don't know if both i2 and instiki-ar use the same schema (I should 
> check). Therefore at this stage I don't know how easy it would be to 
> migrate from i2 to instiki-ar (or vice versa) if I committed to one 
> over the other now. There's lots of things I don't know about them - 
> I'm a little uncertain to commit to either until someone comes up with 
> an agreed roadmap for instiki that marks out the territory to be 
> inhabited by the various forks. This is a difficult issue. As my 
> install of instiki is non-mission critical (a personal wiki on a usb 
> key) I can afford to wait until the dust clears.

Few answers:

I2 is [currently] a small subset of Instiki features, and it is targeted 
at large public wikis (primarily, rubyonrails.org). So, some things will 
simply never be there. For example, the "No Step Three" installation 
process is not a goal for I2 at all.

Despite similar look and feel, I2 is not a fork, it's a rewrite from 
ground up. Instiki-AR, on the other hand, is the same feature set as 
Instiki 0.10.2, more or less. The database schemas are different.

Which one survives - who can say? The main problem with Instiki 
development now is that yours truly doesn't personally need it anymore. 
My current employer [much more enlightened than my previous one] has 
site license for Confluence. Moreover, I get work in Ruby on the job. 
It's not Ruby on Rails yet, but we are working in that direction, too :) 
This is the main reason why I2 will probably grow much faster than 
Instiki in the near future.

By the way, if someone wants to move Instiki forward much faster than 
yours truly (it is quite certainly possible!), please email me. We can 
work something out.

On a more practical note:
To get rid of orphan pages after the import, you should run 
script/reset_references. This takes care of all the alleged orpahns that 
aren't. :)

On the performaqnce front, Instiki caches pre-rendered pages, too.

Hope this clears things up a bit.

Best regards,
Alexey Verkhovsky