General developer forum

I really WANT to replace the current wiki ... unfortunately after Eloy, Helen and myself reviewed nwiki recently we found too many issues still remaining. Overall it's still slightly better to live with the devil we know.

The fact is that we (Moodle HQ) have limited resources and not enough time to fix those issues in nWiki in time for 1.9, so it's up to Ludo's team.

Of course, the new wiki is available to download an install, and a very valuable contribution would be for some intrepid early-adopters to download and install it into their production system, then report any bugs that are found. Getting some real-world testing of the new wiki would hopefully privide compelling evidence that it is ready for prime-time, and can now safely go into an official release.

Hi,
last weeks I've been silent and working on backstage.

Yes, there are some issues with nwiki, and: yes we are working to resolve it.

The main issues are related to the installation/migration process in databases different from mysql. This is because the migration process ( a heavy and critical one, in order to ensure no data is lost) was written for 1.6 and needs to be ported to moodle's 1.7 and above XML-DB lib .

So far we have rewritten this process and I hope that before august we will deliver a new version of nwiki with the installation process and the migration engine fully XML-DB. Then will be up to Martin and the Moodle HQ to decide if it is ready or not for 1.9.

Cheers
Ludo
ps. as I said to Martin, if NWiki does not come into 1.9 would be a good thing to place it in the HEAD of the CVS when we split for the next version since day one.
ps2. I'm starting a new site for all our developments and projects http://www.dfwikilabs.org easier to remember than the old ones

The problem is that as I pointed out in this conversation (on the wiki forum) I (and others) are getting errors that point to Nwiki's basic incompatbility with roles and capabilities. There's no way that I can substitute Nwiki into my production Moodle (though I'd like to) knowing that there are systemic issues that could surface at any moment -- supporting faculty with a live class using a wiki which I know might be flakey would be a nightmare and devastate my reputation (such as it is) .

I do think that the Wiki activity should be put on the front burner development wise. Here's a possible list:

1. Data migration needs attention. After viewing a litany of problems moving from current wiki to Nwiki I decided to drop all the wiki tables in the moodle database before substituting the Nwiki code. Then installation went fine with new tables being generated. But many Moodle systems will want to migrate their wiki data into Nwiki. I wonder whether it might be better to create separate Nwiki tables rather than attempting to reuse the current wiki tables? Just a thought.
2. Modify Nwiki to make it compatible with roles and capabilities.
   
3. Some minor functionality improvements (eg uploaded files seem to be viewable by everyone, regardless of ownership).

What needs to be done in order to substitute Nwiki into 2.0 HEAD? My sense is at least #1 above. My concern is that the longer this is put off the greater the hurdle to getting it into the main Moodle distribution and the greater the likelihood that the code will wither and, come version 2.1, we'll be back to square one.

I have been documenting my Nwiki activies in my Moodle Issues Tiddllywiki and in my Eduspaces Moodle 1.8 experiences community.

For many faculty at Earlham, the Moodle wiki is an answer to a longstanding instructional problem. How to have groups of students working together on a group website that is visible only to the class. A functional, reliable, and rock solid wiki is a great asset to Moodle since it's the only Activity which is purpose designed for group work by students.

Mark