On 3 March 2010 10:19, Tei oscar.vives@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.