Timwi-
the past few days I've been experimenting a bit
with Apache, mod_perl,
MySQL and creating an entire own website. I've never done that before,
and I think I've learnt a lot from this.
Great. mod_perl rules. Are you using DBI? In that case, it should be
relatively easy to switch to PostgreSQL.
I encourage you to move forward with this, and to commit all code to a
separate CVS module. The current code design is very messy, and there's a
lot that can be done to improve it. But do not underestimate the
complexity of the current software -- you will be spending months on this
to get as far as we have. If you don't want to do this, you will end up
very disappointed and frustrated because we won't adopt an incomplete
solution. Any new version should at least have the features listed here:
http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/features.html
That's a *lot*. In addition, if you really want to provide advantages over
the current codebase, please *document* your code. The current codebase is
horribly documented and I still haven't bothered to figure out through
line by line reading what every function does. Perldoc is a great way to
do this. The current documentation of your database schema is completely
insufficient, though. Each table needs its own comment header explaining
what it does, how and why.
Regarding interlanguage links, note that the problem is quite complex:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/
2025
Here is some other stuff that would be important for a redesign:
* have some kind of built in profiling
* test each query on a large dataset before including it
* have some better way to handle edit conflicts, for example, CVS style
merging
* have a better way to handle discussions, e.g. "Post a comment", "Reply
to this", but still do it using wholly editable wiki-pages
* have a category system built right in, perhaps using a meta namespace
* have better image handling with auto-rescaling:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/
2024
* have a template system that can be used by the wiki user:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=wikitech-l&m=105557077500936&w=2
this could perhaps be combined with the general template system.
Regards,
Erik