MoinMoin Wiki

A Python-based wiki with a fairly rich feature set and a nice syntax for linking. Contrast with PikiePikie, which is somewhat simpler.

http://purl.net/wiki/moin/ - you can also do MoinMoin:FrontPage type links

-- RichardDonkin - 25 Mar 2002

MoinMoin has been being updated at a feverish pace of late too

One thing that PikiePikie has that MoinMoin doesn't yet is templates. Juergen is working to add those to MoinMoin.

-- DavidLeBlanc - 25 Mar 2002

Things I like in MoinMoin that aren't in TWiki:

• Easy user preferences form
• Super duper edit page:
  • Preview is shown together with the edit box, so you can go right on changing stuff. This also solves the problems with going back in some browsers deleting the contents of the edit box. I don't think that would be too hard to implement in TWiki.
  • Very nice implementation of a spell checker
• You can subscribe to pages by defining a regex that the topic should match, and you can subscribe to a specific page by clicking a button on the page.
• Notifications are sent immediately, with the change as a unified diff.
• If you search for something and you click through, the words you searched for are highlighted.
• The concept of actions: There is only one script, and viewing, editing, printing, ... is all done by sending url parameters. This allows for less code duplication, which in turn leads to less security problems and bugs. This will be more work to incorporate in TWiki, but I think it's worth it.
• Very fast, on my Sparc 5 it renders pages in 8 seconds where TWiki needs 30-40 seconds (15-20 with mod_perl). (Yeah, I know, I should get a faster home server )
• Good CSS integration

Things I like in TWiki that aren't in MoinMoin:

• RCS for storage, and all previous versions are available
• Multiple webs tightly integrated in the look. In MoinMoin, you need to change the web server configuration to get a different web, and interlinking is not as easy.
• Subdirectories for subwebs, if you are using MegaTWiki.
• Nicer TextFormattingRules, with easy HTML integration for getting really nice pages really quickly
• It's written in Perl, which just happens to be better suited for text manipulation, which shows in the feature set of the search macros and so on.

I just wanted to store this knowledge to save others the search

-- WoutMertens - 27 Aug 2002

Good summary. Certainly I think the other Wiki's are working hard to catch up with TWiki. I'm personally of the opinion that TWiki's main strength is in its extensible RenderingPipeline; Has Moin Moin got a Plugins architecture?

For me the killer missing feature in TWiki is ImmediateWebNotifyPerTopic; without it it is too easy to lose your place on a conversation.

You say Jurgen is working towards implementing new things; is it just him or does he have a large active development team? Do they work on key features or on the periphery?

-- MartinCleaver - 28 Aug 2002

If you want instant email notifications w/ unified diffs (on editor's demand) and search keyword color hilightling, check out PhotonSkin.

-- EstebanManchado - 03 Dec 2002

On another topic... I'm switching from MoinMoin to TWiki - does anyone know of an easy way to port pages from the MoinMoin to TWiki?

-- TimMansfield

GenericWikiToTWikiAddOn is probably the best place to start. You'll have to generate your own translation table but the framework is there.

-- MattWilkie - 06 Mar 2003

Or, less generic, the DolphinToTWikiAddOn.

FWIW, I get many comments in the download form stating that they switch from this or that Wiki to TWiki, so a MoinMoinToTWikiAddOn etc would help our community.

-- PeterThoeny - 07 Mar 2003

I wrote down on GenericWikiToTWikiAddOn some code I used to migrate from MoinMoin to TWiki 20040901.

-- BenVoui - 07 Oct 2004

For the record, I recently attempted to install MoinMoin on Mac OS 10.4.11 . The base install went all right, but from there it was nothing but headache. I simply could not get plugins to work, all sorts of incompatibility and incongruencies here and there -- the code simply couldn't get past line after line of python code. And I'm a fan of Python, too! I eventually gave up and ripped the entire install out and migrated over to TWiki. For comparison I have found the TWiki community far more responsive to questions (never got anything out of the moin moin group and its development seems to go in fits and spurts.

-- RedByer - 21 May 2008