Re: Using MediaWiki as a CMS

On 14/10/2010 16:58, Sandro Hawke wrote:
> Has anyone looked into using a Mediawiki instance as the backend for a
> normal/modern looking site?

The portal of the AIFB institute at KIT is an example of the use of 
(Semantic) MediaWiki as a CMS [1]. All data input is done via forms 
(Semantic Forms extension), most users do not ever see or edit wikitext. 
You can access much of the architecture online if you change the URLs of 
the site to show the wiki source code, but editing is of course not for 
the public.

I was not the person to set this up but I know that the main work went 
into skinning (for a pre-defined corporate design) and performance 
tuning (some of the very long auto-generated lists, e.g. of 
publications, took rather long to parse in MediaWiki, requiring some 
tricks and well-configured servers). The GUI and general user requests 
took also some time. A major difficulty was the requirement to maintain 
pages in two languages in parallel without really editing two pages each 
time new data is entered. Some custom code was used to enable this, 
since MediaWiki does not by default support automated triggers for page 
creation (e.g. if a new person is entered in German language, then the 
wiki also creates an English version of the page; the data 
synchronisation between both pages is again simple since the data comes 
from the semantic back-end anyway).

The system replaced an earlier Zope-based solution that became 
unmaintainable due to the ever increasing amount of custom DB extensions 
for things like publication lists. It remains to be seen if the new site 
is more maintainable in the long run -- some of the wikitext for forms 
and templates certainly is rather complicated, too. The new site was 
well received and users across the institute now edit content there 
without problems. No special training was needed since most of the 
standard input forms are self-explaining or have sufficient online 
documentation.

Regards,

Markus

[1] http://www.aifb.kit.edu/

-- 
Markus Krötzsch
Oxford  University  Computing  Laboratory
Room 306, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QD, UK
+44 (0)1865 283529    http://korrekt.org/

Received on Thursday, 14 October 2010 19:38:37 UTC