On 3 March 2010 10:19, Tei <oscar.vives(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I feel It takes a enormeous effort to move a proyect
managed by
programmers and sysadmins for programmers and sysadmins to be
palatable by mere desktop users. The good news is that sysadmins and
programmers are desktop users too, so will love a sexier interface,
and more usability.
MediaWiki is server software and its audience is sysadmins.
That said, for anyone with a reasonably recent Linux distro who is OK
with the command line, it's incredibly easy to install. (Even on
CentOS 4, if you put in some more recent packages of stuff.)
I have no idea if there's a nice Windows package friendly enough for
the low-to-medium-tier NT admins (those who watch progress bars for a
living), but that would be nice. They're not going to get away from
the command line and text configuration files, though.
(GUIfying LocalSettings.php is a bad, bad idea. There's enough bad
GUIs where someone just turned every possible text option into two
hundred radio-button options. A good GUI beats a command line ... a
command line beats a bad GUI.)
I would also dispute using WordPress as the gold standard example of
command-line-free administration ... I run WordPress happily on my own
blogs, and the one-click upgrade is very easy and slick, but I just
wouldn't be able to do what I want to do with it without considerable
command-line fiddling and PHP code hacking. WordPress lets you do
anything you want, much as MediaWiki does, but it similarly does not
restrain you from shooting yourself in the foot (as I have done
frequently).
- d.