here follows a discussion that took place on BugReports - maybe we should collect some more general pages on *TransitionStories...

Thomas: I don't know where to write this - so I put it in here. Hope it's ok. (is there a page for such questions?)

The tools pages here don't work - I get the error:

Restricted Access
Please first create an admin account in .../fragments/funcs/auth.php

This happens on all these pages (e.g. http://erfurtwiki.sourceforge.net/tools/t_backup.php)

I tried to find some infos about importing and exporting the database to XML. I would like to convert from MediaWiki. It's hard to find any info on the EWiki pages. Either the pages are broken (like the tools pages), or the search function doesn't work right - or the links are leading to other eWiki desings (wich is totally confusing) - or there are no infos at all (at least I found nothing about such plugins for Import and Export).

milky: You could have gone into the SupportForum or similar, but here is ok too.

First, the tools/ are always password protected per default (they are separate things, don't belong to the wiki). I haven't needed them here until now, so they're still. We have the ability to import pages, and in qfact two or three tools to do so (one is a very powerful commandline tool). And there is the TextUpload plugin (disabled here), which could do that. However none of them uses a XML format, even if they did it would probably a different XML dialect than MediaWiki exports.

You could however insert the wiki source pages from another wiki or package all rendered HTML pages into a .zip and feed that into TextUpload (it can deal with them). But then, ErfurtWiki is quite different from MediaWiki and MediaWiki uses a lot of weird markup - I'd even go so far to say, that MediaWiki is not a real Wiki due to its lack/avoidance of WikiWord support. Also they are probably less interested in MeatBall:WikiMarkupStandard or proposed exchange formats.

I'll eventually have a look at the MediaWikiXmlFormat to tell something more interesting about compatibility, but not today ;-)

Tomas: Thanks alot for the fast and extensive reply. I'll check the possibilities you noted. Just wondering: A standard XML format would be quite useful for changing between Wiki's. Sad that MediaWiki isn't interested in exchange formats or a markup standard. But with the CamelCase I have to "agree" with them: I dont like it myself.

BTW: I had some other problems during installation - especially with the ewiki configuration wizard. The setup.php wrote some errors in the config.php -> first it had the trimming plugin twice in the list - leading to a fatal php-error. And the dir for the flatFiles had a slash before folder name - also leading to errors. It only works without the slash. Took a while until I had sorted that out :-) But I have it running now - just wanted to note these bugs.

milky: Thanks a lot for the note, I'll check the SetupWizard for both bugs (really not noticed until now).

TextUpload in fact supports two XML formats, namely XHTML and the OpenOffice one ;-) However, MediaWiki is likely to use something very different :( In other news: *CoWiki internally uses a XML format to store pages, but that won't help you any further, I guess, as it is again something different. You can use CamelCase-less page names in ewiki, but transition from MediaWiki is difficult cause of their space->underscore transformation (eventually possible to hack something like that into ewiki).

Thomas: One thing I noticed: all big *WikiProjects do support a *DocBook-Export - or will be in the future. OpenOffice can read *DocBook documents. So this could be a nice interface for import export (and of course converting to pdf).

milky: *DocBook is in fact a really big beast, the reason it is not supported however is, that *DocBook doesn't have a real MIME type until yet (TextUpload depends on it). I've bothered the developers to adopt one (see Google:DocBookMimeType cache, wiki closed), but nothing happened until now. Therefore I rather go with OpenOffice meanwhile - anyhow makes a better interchange format ;-)
It just takes a little more time for us to get on the wagon, XML in/export will come, but it takes some time. And sadly it is currently not a real option for migration to ErfurtWiki.

milky: On a side note, I refuse to accept *DocBook, if they'd really take a application/* MIME type, just because "there are less issues" (as Norman said over there). It's braindamaged to do so; and I don't support anything that hurts standardisation processes that way. duh

Thomas: Damn, theres always a downside. The openOffice thingy sounds good so far. Hope it gets standard for the other wikis too. Thanks for the replies.

milky: I eventually fix the TextUpload to accept file name extensions (what I generally consider stupid) as aliases for MIME types, so we could take advantage of *DocBook toolchains on Unix servers.