Migrating attachments

Next problem...

In moinmoin, attachments are associated with the page to which they were
attached. In MediaWiki, the attachments belong to a flat space. This
means that moinmoin attachments that have the same filename will cause
clashes in MediaWiki space. Images and general media have their own
"image:" and "media:" spaces in MediaWiki, but both are flat. To
preserve the association with the parent page on moinmoin, the names of
the attachments will have to change accordingly.

Furthermore, uploading attachments to MediaWiki is not straightforward,
as it seems that MediaWiki doesn't have a general attachment mechanism.
If MediaWiki doesn't recognise the file extension then you can't upload
it. For example, to configure MediaWiki to permit the upload of PDF
"images", you add the following configuration:

$wgFileExtensions[] = 'pdf';

One of the most common attachment types is Zip compressed files. These
need to be handled specially, with the following configuration (assuming
the server is on a un*x system):

$wgMimeDetectorCommand = 'file -bi';

This is far from perfect because one has to anticipate the file
extensions, or decide not to port certain file types. I find this a
little disappointing, but hope that someone out there has a better idea.

---Rotan

Received on Friday, 19 October 2007 18:39:30 UTC