~adeodato/ blog/ entries/ 2008/ 01/ 12/ Ikiwiki for, cough, debian.org?

Ikiwiki for, cough, debian.org?

(Disclaimer: I’ve decided to blog this mainly to get it off my mind. I’m not claiming it’s viable or appropriate, nor that the tool would be up to the job, or anything else. Heck, I’m not even involved with debian-www at all, but don’t we all love to share happy ideas.)

The other day, when trying to think of a possible Summer of Code project to undertake this year, I thought that working on migrating (by making a parallel copy, see below) www.debian.org and wiki.debian.org to be ikiwiki-powered could be one, and see how it goes.

Me, I think that having www.debian.org use a markup language, and have wiki.debian.org (or www.debian.org/wiki) live in a real VCS (us being Debian people, after all) would be two big pluses.

The www instance would be only editable via the repository, either by the current group or DD-wide, and would have stuff like htmlscrubber disabled. And the wiki would be another setup/instance, with the normal setup for an ikiwiki wiki setup, backed up by a real e.g. Subversion repository open to all DDs, and possibly contributors at request. I believe that would be very very cool. Plus web edits as usual.

This could also be used as a fresh start, and maybe as an opportunity to accomplish the long-awaited re-design of the site: if this job is done by making a live paralell copy, able to update itself from the current webml repository, and MoinMoin as well, it would give an interesting playground for experimenting, and could be adopted later on, when it’s truly polished, if ever.