Dave,
Some specific replies on points
On the customizations, are they purely UI, or do we have functional
patches as well?
See
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User:TerryE/phpBB3.0.7_Upgrade/Closed_Issues_and_Actions#Forum_Customisation
This is great information!
There was a supplementary point here. After 30 years in EDS, what you
are asking for is in my DNA and this is how I work! :LoL:
I agree. The alternative to getting this support within Apache.org is to
discard the knowledge in 300,000 posts across the 9 forums. The user community
forums would probably explore alternatives if this looked likely to happen.
The OOo wiki contains 10,521 content pages and 11.338 uploaded files. These
form a critical service to the end-user community. Note that the cwiki markup
format doesn't support many of the MediaWiki specific markups in this content.
Supporting a MediaWiki like supporting phpBB is something that can certainly be
considered. What's required is that the Apache OOo community provide enough
support to infrastructure so that the job can get done.
Do you feel a MediaWiki transition is a larger or smaller project?
This is something that I'll cover in depth on the specific migration
planning wiki page, but the challenge here is that the cwiki markup
grammer is different to that of mediawiki and largely a functional
subset. Worse, mediawiki supports extensions to allow you to extend
this. The OOo implementation currently uses *42* such extensions. One
of these was custom-developed by the German OOo team. With over 10,000
pages of content, sentencing this lot and even if we establish a
migration ruleset to map 90% of the non-conformities, we still looking
at a MAJOR project.
Setting up a mirror of the current system on a standard LAMP stack is a
low risk low effort continuity alternative, until the project works out
its medium term strategy. BTW, I have just spent the last few days
setting up my own VM copy of the production wiki (standard Ubuntu
10.04-3 LTS LAMP over VirtualBox) so I know what's involved here.
Regards
Terry
