First of all, a Happy New Year to all. I hope you had a good time during the holidays.
At last, the new Wiki site is ready, and if you are reading this you should be seeing it right now, even if you came to the Blog directly through some link: the Blog should have opened within the new site.
A short explanation is in order here about the delay from the promised date, at least for the few people who have been waiting for the new site.
Initially I tried to build the site with Community Server, a windows based program that offered blogs and forums. The problem was that it did not offer content management, and it did not have a wiki yet. The development of a wiki plugin had started, but it was taking forever.
So I started looking around for other options in the LAMP platform (linux-apache-mysql-php). The main solutions were Xoops, Drupal and Mambo Joomla. When I saw that Joomla had an extension that integrated MediaWiki, Mambowiki, I decided to use it. I installed Joomla and Mambowiki, configured and customized it, worked out several problems I had, and started adding content. However, Mambowiki had several limitations which, although not critical, they were annoying enough.
So I started from scratch again installing MediaWiki, something I had not dared to do from the beginning because I thought it would be beyond my capabilities. I was wrong however. Everything went fine, I was able to work out some problems I had (one of which was the integration of MediaWiki and the SMF forums, so that users don’t have to log in twice), and the result was much better. Also, I was able to export the wiki pages I had added in the previous Joomla-Mambowiki installation, and import them in Mediawiki.
When I wrote in Louise’s Blog that the site will be ready very soon, I was at the point where I expected to finish adding content at the initial Joomla-Mambowiki installation. During the delay from the promised date it was that I installed Mediawiki, configured and customized it, built the integration with SMF, moved the content from the initial Joomla-Mambowiki installation, and added some new content.
So, feel free to browse the site (Wiki, Forum and Blog), and to register if you feel like editing pages in the Wiki or posting at the forum. (Non registered or not logged in users can still leave comments in the Discussion page of each article of VPWiki.) It took almost five months, but I did what I set out to do as described in the previous post of this blog, and it feels really good 🙂 🙂 🙂 .