Comparison Of Usemod With Mediawiki

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Simon The Zealot | Tech Tips Question 3

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I'm comparing the systems to decide which to deploy for various uses, and here are my personal notes. For a lot of uses, especially more lightweight sites, Usemod is probably preferable. On some of the control panel appliance softwares, there is a considerable penalty for the use of PHP, which MediaWiki?Create requires. Also there are the resource issues associated with MySQL .
To test the two systems, I prepared a Garnet/Directory of my bookmarks to spend some time using this system. This test uses subpages. I tried a similar experiment at [Garnet's Bookmark's at Wikipedia].

I also prepared [Garnet's Bookmarks]?Create to try out the system without worrying about subpages. I've prepended the additional pages with "Garnet's Bookmarks -" to avoid naming conflicts with anything else in this system. I have not duplicated this experiment at Wikipedia to avoid creating any problems in their global namespace.

Here are some of the differences I've come across:

• MediaWiki?Create uses SQL data store.
• MediaWiki?Create uses PHP, Usemod uses Perl.
• Semantics for editing pages are somewhat different. See the section below on semantics
• An article with 3 or more ==text== sections will get a small table of contents after the first paragraph.
• There was a reference in MediaWiki?Create about how to have links to sections (anchors) within a page.
• MediaWiki?Create will allow any individual section of the page to be edited without seeing the rest of the contents of the page in the edit window.

Editing Semantics The WikiPedia?Create editing semantics are covered [[here]]. I'll just mention some of the more obvious differences a user of these systems will notice.

• # ==TEXT== on MediaWiki?Create will make this text H1
• # ===TEXT=== on MediaWiki?Create will make this text H2
• The leading *# would cause the MediaWiki?Create to indent a level of indentation.
• MediaWiki?Create allowed for piped links to subpages, (giving a subpage, but showing different link text). I couldn't figure out how to get that to work with UseModWiki .
• Single CRLF on end of line (single line break) does not start a new paragraph on MediaWiki?Create. MediaWiki?Create requires a double line break.

Bugs in UseModWiki ?

It might not be fair to call these bugs, lets just say they are unexpected behaviour, or lacking features.....

• /USA_States doesn't create a link to that named subpage. Would expect a link to that subpage, with a the text shown having any _ replaced by spaces. /USAStates?Create (as in Garnet/USAStates?Create) works ok.
• Garnet/USAStates?Create creates an unexpected link to the USAStates subpage of the current page. Double bracketing the text, Garnet/USAStates?Create create a link to the expected place.
• [Garnet/Cats Cats]?Create One might expect that to go to /Cats?Create subpage of Garnet?Create with text of simply Cats, but instead it wants to go to a subpage named Cats_Cats.

Written by Garnet?Create (Last update 14Jan2004)

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