Re: org-mode based groupware wiki

[Torsten Wagner <torsten.wagner@gmail.com>]

Dear Eric,

thanks for the reply.

>> Now I was able to test both gollumn and org-ehtml it puts me into a dilemma.
>>
>
> Multiple viable options for Org-mode wikis is a great problem to have.

Indeed it is as usual with FOSS all those pesty options to choice
from. Why couldn't I just trough my money to multi-billion dollar
companies and use whatever the selling department thought would be
best for me. Silly me.... ;)

> See the "Integrating with version control" section of the org-ehtml
> README [1].  It provides VC integration with just a couple of lines of
> Emacs Lisp which could be added to the webserver's Emacs config.

I didn't test this yet, but read about it. I will give it a try again.

>> Gollumn itself seems to run on the shoulder of giants and keep itself
>> rather small.
>
> Org-ehtml is itself just a tiny hack which (I think) neatly combines the
> power of the new Org export system, and the power of Elnode running on
> top of a full fledged Emacs instance.  Org-ehtml is more than two orders
> of magnitude smaller than gollum (judging by compressed source code).

Well indeed this was a stupid comparison. Sure org-ehtml is even
smaller and stands on the shoulder giants too, namely of org-mode and
emacs....

> Understood.  I hope I haven't wasted your time and I appreciated that
> you got org-ehtml running.  Gollum is a very mature option, and is
> probably your best bet unless you fall into one of the following.

Wasted my time?! ;) Are you kidding me. It was very informative and
fun. Seriously, I always enjoy having org-babel or in this case e-html
related problems, just for the joy I have to talk too you ;)
There is still no decision made yet and I guess it is even not a time
critical decision. Since both systems use org-mode files I could
easily switch between them any time later.

> 1. need more esoteric features of Org-mode or
I frighten looking at the feature test from Karl Voit
(https://github.com/novoid/github-orgmode-tests), the features need
not to be sooo esoteric at all.

> 2. you like the idea of being able to run arbitrary Emacs Lisp as part
>    of the editing process or
Yes you are right, thinking about, the advantage would be that I could
use all org-mode related code and do not need to reimplement it in any
other language. E.g., one could get a pretty printed table in text
form easily calling org-table-align, or convert copy and pasted CSV
data into a table calling org-table-convert. However, that would
require an extension of the current web-based editor.

> 3. (like me) you don't have ruby installed on your system and a ruby web
>    server seems like a lot of bloat for a wiki
Here I would need to give gollumn the credit that you can use another
web server as well e.g. apache should work.

> The reason Gollum is so much larger is because it has a large team of
> people adding the many handlers for edge cases and extra bells and
> whistles which make for a robust tool.

Sure, and please understand that I do not want to compare them
one-by-one. It wasn't my intention to do any ranking. Just looking for
the best solution for my task. If a 5-liner bash script from 1995
could do what I want I would be equally happy too ;)

> My goal with org-ehtml was to produce a tiny working and (most
> importantly) easily hackable core.  I don't have time to really flesh it
> out myself, but I was/am hoping that someone interested in doing some
> elisp and web programming would/will find it fun to extend the existing
> proof-of-concept implementation.  I think it could easily grow into a
> full featured Org-mode backed wiki, or online TODO tracker, or online
> bug tracking database.

I understand and I would be happy to be part of it. I simply need to
test a bit more which way to go. I like the idea to use emacs and the
"real" exporter. Just need to think of the non-orgers...

> For speed reasons you'd probably still want the constant Emacs session
> running, and you may open up many of the same security concerns.

Yep, I was thinking about that and thought already about a emacs
daemon running. You are right, that might put me into the same
situation I have using org-ehtml directly. Would it be
possible/reasonable to create something which use e.g. apache or
lighthttpd as webbrowser and some javascript to implement the editor
functions and emacs+org-mode purely to generate the html pages? Using
a well established webserver, would give me at least the illusion that
it might be safer. There are some editors implemented in javascript
already. Maybe one could use one of them?

I think it all condense down to the phrase I gave in my early post:

org-ehtml: org-mode with editable html export and a minimal webserver
gollumn: ruby-based wiki-system which supports (partially) org-mode syntax

Both are very different concepts with a different idea behind it.

Thanks again for all the infos and support

Torsten