Since this will be my first post on planet SoC, some introductions may be in order. I’m a 4th year student of Physics from India, who will this summer be working on an installation and administration system for the MoinMoin wiki engine.

More information (possibly more than you would really want to know) can be found on the Moin wiki. Through the course of this summer, I hope to use the blog to provide periodic glimpses into the state of the project without really going into elaborate detail. Some general python discussion is also on the table, especially since this would probably be the most complex bit of python code I’ve written so far.

The basic goal of the project is described in the abstract as :

The proposal is to create a graphical web-based UI for installation and management of MoinMoin wiki instances, including a number of the usual administrative tasks that typically require editing the configuration files or manually running scripts. If implemented, it could lower the barrier for people who would like to try to configure and then maintain a MoinMoin wiki.

If all goes according to plan, by the end of the summer* you’d be able to take moin out for a spin without having to dabble around config files and ‘understand’ the way the system works. Not only that, it should be possible for a wiki admin to maintain and administer his/her wiki (or wiki farm) from the wiki itself, and not worry too much about backups, migrations, transplantations, etc.

*It might take longer for it to be shipped with moin. Its possible that it’ll take until moin 2.0 for it to be shipped with moin itself. In any case, I’ll try to have a patch available for the latest stable moin version at the time of the end of GSoC (or as soon as its finished, whichever comes later :P) that you can use.