Diane didn’t have to see any doctors today, so I went to work as usual, where I finished installing the Socialtext Open Wiki on a spare machine. The installation was, ummm, challenging — Socialtext says that improving it is a high priority — but possible.
The job might have been easier if I were more familiar with Perl, but I really don’t like that language — I had to use it back in the early 90’s when I was spending a lot of time on AIX (and, let’s face it, Perl is easier to deal with than ksh), but I never got into it. The syntax looks too much like random punctuation for me. I much prefer Python, which just feels right to me — it’s a worthy successor to Rexx, my first real scripting language (I refuse to count EXEC2 or CLIST, both of which I used because I had to).
But I digress.
Even though I’ve got Socialtext up and running, I’ll probably go back to MediaWiki for the project at hand. Socialtext is prettier, and probably would fit this application better, but I haven’t a clue where I could add support for using an external LDAP authentication and authorization tool — in contrast, I have that running for MediaWiki right now, exactly the way I need it. And running code is always a strong argument.
But I’m going to keep an eye on Socialtext, because it really would be nice to use. And besides, they’re hosting Wiki Wednesday tomorrow.