Portal0510En

2005-10-.. New FFII Portal

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For quite a while there has been the portal site for the FFII, www.ffii.org, has been in a poor state, and various alternatives have been proposed.

Candidates

Synopsis of the latest candidate

Presentation of en.ffii.org project by aptiko

aptiko wrote in 2005-10:

Overview

You can see the proposed web site at http://en.ffii.org/, which is the result of several months of careful work. You may remember the work I'd done in May, in which I had created a new system for static pages, together with conversion utilities that could convert the existing sites. I have abandoned that, for the following reasons:

First, the existing web pages are so messed up and chaotic that automatically converting them is not enough. Just improving their look, and not improving navigation, for example, is highly insufficient. A better generation system than MLHT, usable by more than one people, would be important as infrastructure, but except for that we really need to build a web site from scratch.

Second, despite the simplicity of my May system, people would be reluctant to use it and much more confident to go wiki, which is a much more familiar way of working. In addition, although the May system was usable by more than one people, it was not usable by many, like a wiki. Wiki automatically keeps the history, whereas May would need manual history with RCS.

So the new web site is just a wiki. It has a custom skin that I have made. However, the power of that new web site does not lie in the visual design, which can easily be changed, but in the logical design; notably, in its navigation menu, which you will be pleased to find that it is defined in a wiki page: http://en.ffii.org/navigation_menu; and in the care of many little details that you are going to see when you read on and when you browse.

Since the new web site is made from scratch and is going to be manually expanded, the old web sites must be kept for reference. We keep swpat.ffii.org as is and we rename www.ffii.org to oldwww.ffii.org or old.ffii.org, whatever we like (this is configurable in the new web site, where, in order to refer to a page in old swpat, you don't type http://swpat.ffii.org/whatever but ffii:swpat:whatever instead; in order to refer to the old web site, you type ffii:oldwww:whatever; in order to refer to the listinfo page of the "whatever" mailing list, you type ffii:listinfo:whatever).

The system is installed on gumbo, a 1&1 machine leased by FFII, AMD 2.2 GHz with 2 GB RAM and 150 GB disk space. The moin configuration and data files are being backed up daily on apunkt. Jeroen said he's going to setup a more complete backup solution in a week or so, but the temporary backup setup I've made on apunkt is adequate and safe.

Multilinguality

The current new web site runs at http://en.ffii.org/. Obviously the german site can be at http://de.ffii.org/ (or http://www.ffii.de/), and so on. The wiki engine is already configured to host many wikis (a wiki farm, as it is called) on the server, each for a different language. http://www.ffii.org/ shall be used as an alias to http://en.ffii.org/, but if, in the future, we have decent websites in more languages, it can be used as a portal for the specific language sites (much like http://www.wikipedia.org/). http://de.ffii.org/ and http://el.ffii.org/ have been created as examples, the el one even having a Greek navigation menu as an example, but are otherwise empty.

In the future it will also be possible to indicate to the system which e.g. german page is equivalent to each english, french, and so on page, and have alternative language links in each article, much like wikipedia. This is not possible yet because MoinMoin does not provide this functionality. I have performed a fair amount of research on that, which has resulted in the article "Creating multilingual wikis and wiki engines", http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/Creating_multilingual_wikis_and_wiki_engines. It remains to make the implementation, which I am willing to do, subject to available time and mood, and tasks that can be judged as more important, namely press work and secrecy policy (see below).

Until that functionality is developed, not having alternative language links is a problem we can certainly live with, like thousands of other multilingual websites.

Security system

The current security system is somewhat inflexible, as it is quickly hacked by Heather Stern to use aktiv. This is what it currently does:

  1. User accounts are taken from aktiv.
  2. All aktiv users are allowed to view and edit unprotected pages.
  3. Unsubscribed users can only view, not edit, pages.
  4. For individual pages, admins can specify whether they want the page to be readable by everyone, or by all aktiv users, or only by admins.
  5. Whether a user is admin or not is not specified in aktiv, but in the moinmoin configuration file, which can be changed by the moinmoin administrator (unix users belonging to the moinmoin group).

Other features

Swpatcnino (renamed to "Software patent news") is ready and uses a rewritten RSS generation system, which has been integrated into moin as a custom action; there's thus no cronjob involved, but dynamic rss generation upon request. RSS is also available for RecentChanges (a MoinMoin feature).

Visiting a nonexistent page, except for offering to create it, actually returns a 404 and even provides a link to the old web site, in case that is where the visitor intended to go.

URLs whose hostname ends in 'ffii.org' are considered internal and are thus displayed without the earth icon (the default moin behaviour is that only intra-wiki links are internal).

Visit FFII-specific wiki help (accessible from the menu after you login, or directly at http://en.ffii.org/FFII-specific_wiki_help) for more information.

Extensibility

The custom code has been written by Heather Stern and me. Whenever it has been possible, extensions have been written using MoinMoin's plugin system, so they integrate cleanly without changing the core code. Some changes, however, have necessarily been made in the core, and they concern mainly Heather's aktiv code. Our changes are cleanly kept in code checked out from the repository, so upgrading to future versions is a clean process where the checked out code is updated and then conflicts are resolved. Meanwhile, this need for aktiv integration has spurred a reorganisation of that part of the code by MoinMoin leader Thomas Waldmann, which will make future MoinMoin versions use external authentication systems without needing to change core code.

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