Moving the wiki to MediaWiki

[Michael Hall]

Hello docs team,

First off, I want to apologize for the amount of time it's taken to get
a resolution to the problems faced by the wiki.

I wanted to let you all know that we will be actively moving towards
switching both wiki.ubuntu.com and help.ubuntu.com/community/ off of
MoinMoin and on to MediaWiki. This has been approved by Canonical IS as
long as we make it possible to deploy it to Canonical's internal
OpenStack cloud.

Here are the tasks that need to be done in order to make this happen:

1) Provide a Juju charm with a hardened installation of MediaWiki. There
is already a MediaWiki charm, and we will work with Marco Ceppi and
Jorge Castro to ensure that it has the relevant security configurations
enabled.

2) Provide a Mojo spec to WebOps. Mojo is a tool for automated
deployment and configuration of sites, which will use the charm
mentioned above, but also configuration for the database, proxies, and
anything else that will be used by the deployment. This will likely be a
time-consuming step in the process, but it will allow for easy and
reproducible deployments in the future.

3) Migrate data from MoinMoin to MediaWiki format. There are scripts on
the internet that claim to do this, and we will need to evaluate and
thoroughly test them. Alan Pope has already requested a copy of the
production wiki data to use for testing these scripts, however IS wants
to make sure that any private/sensitive user data in there is sanitized
before handing it over. We will continue working with IS to make that
happen.

3.5) We need to make sure that images and other attachments are
moved/uploaded to where MediaWiki can use them. I don't know if the
conversion scripts will do this for us, or if it will require additional
work.

4) We need to figure out how to give MediaWiki an Ubuntu theme. As far
as I know there hasn't been any work on this yet.

These things are being worked on by members of the Ubuntu Community Team
(or will be in the near future), but the more help we get the faster it
will go. If anybody is familiar with the tools or processes for any of
these steps, please get in touch.

-- 
Michael Hall
mhall119 at ubuntu.com