From: Bret Pettichord <bpettichord@...>
Date: 2006-10-23T03:55:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Recommendations for a Ruby Wiki, preferably with bidi support?

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instiki
>
> "As of October 12, 2006, Instiki does not appear to be under active
> development anymore, and its own website has not been functional for
> some time."
>
> The rubyforge page looks out of date, and instiki.org wouldn't come up
> for me.
> --
> James Britt

I recently selected Pimki as a personal wiki. I wanted a Ruby-based
wiki that supported textile. I  also wanted to use it store my personal
notes and todo-lists. Pimki is a version of Instiki that also supports
the "todo:" tag much as it is supported by Eclipse for Ruby code. (The
todo items are extracted from all the pages and served a special todo
page.)

I also spoke with Alexey Verkhovsky, the maintainer of Instiki. His
public email account was overloaded with spam, and the instiki website
was taken down, i presume, because it was overloaded with wiki spam.
But he is still working on it. If you look at svn.instiki.org, you will
several commits in September.

I'm using version "2.0" of Pimki. Namely this:
pimki.rubyforge.org/pimki-2.0.zip. These is also a branch of Pimki
called 2.0 zombie, but i think it is different (not sure). I have
reported some minor problems with it and received prompt replies from
Assaph Mehr, the maintainer of Pimki.

Both projects seem to be struggling with the backend technology.
Instiki used Madeliene. One of the great things about this was that it
made instiki a two step install on Windows and often a one-step install
on Mac and Linux (when ruby was already installed).

Apparently, Madeleine has stability problems and both projects have,
separately been moving to use different, more SQL based backend
technology. But this signficantly complicates the install.

Anyhow, i'm using a version of Pimki that still uses Madeleine and i am
happy with it. I try to install the newer versions of both tools, but
found the complications involved not worth the trouble.

I'd love to see some more community organize around one of these tools,
help resolve the issues with persistence, and make the wiki technology
easier to extend without forking. Since this is a Rails-based wiki, i
would think that there would be a lot of interest and knowledge that
could be brought to bear.

Bret

Lead Developer, Watir