On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 1:11 AM, rusi <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > Aha! There you are! Its 'page editor' here and not the html which > 'display source' (control-u) which a browser would show. And wikimedia > is the software that mediates. > > The usual direction (seen by users of wikipedia) is that wikimedia > takes this text, along with the other unrelated (metadata?) seen > around -- sidebar, tabs etc, css settings and munges it all into html > > The other direction (seen by editors of wikipedia) is that you edit a > page and that page and history etc will show the changes, > reflecting the fact that the SQL content has changed.
MediaWiki is fundamentally very similar to a structure that I'm trying to deploy for a community web site that I host, approximately thus: * A git repository stores a bunch of RST files * A script auto-generates index files based on the presence of certain file names, and renders via rst2html * The HTML pages are served as static content MediaWiki is like this: * Each page has a history, represented by a series of state snapshots of wikitext * On display, the wikitext is converted to HTML and served. The main difference is that MediaWiki is optimized for rapid and constant editing, where what I'm pushing for is optimized for less common edits that might span multiple files. (MW has no facility for atomically changing multiple pages, and atomically reverting those changes, and so on. Each page stands alone.) They're still broadly doing the same thing: storing marked-up text and rendering HTML. The fact that one uses an SQL database and the other uses a git repository is actually quite insignificant - it's as significant as the choice of whether to store your data on a hard disk or an SSD. The system is no different. >> MediaWiki uses an SQL database to store that lump of text, but >> ultimately the relationship is between wikitext and HTML, no SQL >> involvement. > > Dunno what you mean. Every time someone browses wikipedia, things are > getting pulled out of the SQL and munged into the html (s)he sees. Yes, but that's just mechanics. The fact that the PHP scripts to operate Wikipedia are being pulled off a file system doesn't mean that MediaWiki is an ext3-to-HTML renderer. It's a wikitext-to-HTML renderer. Anyway. As I said, your point is still mostly there, as long as you use wikitext rather than SQL. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list