Ralf, On Wednesday, September 27, 2006 7:50 AM you wrote: > > I'll probably need some time to bring me up-to-date. >
If you have questions about Plone, ZWiki or Zope, please feel free to ask. I will try to help. > As I have learned by now, there are several different programs > that implement a wiki concept (Zwiki, Twiki, MediaWiki, ... > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software > ). Was there any good reason to choose Zwiki for Axiom? > In retrospect I think there was no especially good reason to choose ZWiki/LatexWiki - only the timing and a matter of convenience. Plus it turned out that the maintainer of the LaTeX extension for ZWiki (Bob McElrath) happened also to be interested in Axiom. :-) It is amusing to me that ZWiki is not shown in this comparison. At the time (almost three years ago) there were very few other wiki's that included support for LaTeX. On another project I had already had some experience with Plone and Zope. ZWiki is written in Python using Zope as the web application server and object-oriented database. I consider this a "higher-level" application development environment compared to some other scripting languages and choice of database or file system. But this is large a subject matter of "taste". > The reason, I am asking is that we currently run Twiki at RISC, > but I am not so convinced whether it is better/worse than Zwiki > or MediaWiki. (It's a pain to learn just another wiki syntax...) > I have looked at Twiki, and used both MediaWiki and Moinmoin. I think all three of these now have optional LaTeX support. https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/MathModePlugin http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_math_markup http://johannes.sipsolutions.net/Projects/new-moinmoin-latex And they all could probably quite easily be adapted to interface with Axiom and other computer algebra packages the way that ZWiki/MathAction does now. MediaWiki is famous because it is the software that runs Wikipedia. The Sage project is using Moinmoin possibly because it is written in Python which is also the implementation language for Sage. But Moinmoin does not use Zope so it is simpler in that respect. The "wiki syntax" in all of these systems was originally intended to be very simple to use so as not to represent any barrier for new users, but this goal has in most cases been abandoned because it turns out that people do care about the format. Most of these systems have some form of "WYSIWYG page editing" which is supposed to be easy for new users to create nicely formatted pages. Moinmoin in particular has a very nice editor. ZWiki has this as an option but I have turned it off because unfortunately it does not work properly with the LatexWiki embedded LaTeX commands. Actually I am rather surprised by the relatively slow rate of adoption of the wiki concept but on the other hand, after three years of watching closely it is clear to me that it is very gradually growing in popularity - not declining. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
