[Pmwiki-users] Three Questions

[Spam Account Speedxs]

Theo Armour wrote:

> And, yes, PmWiki is open ? delightfully open ? and it has many other 
> wonderful aspects. This is why I am interested in moving my files to 
> PMWiki.
>
> But at some time in the future something very cool will come along and 
> we will all gradually move from PmWiki into this new cool thing. Even 
> Pm will do this.
>
> The real questions are: how long will it be before the change occurs 
> and how difficult will the translation be.
>
> Past experience tells me that moving a web site from one generating 
> system to another takes time ? much more time than you want.
>
> I have been moving computer files since 1967. Every decade it does get 
> easier, but I am really tired of doing this.
>
> I have built web sites for a good number of needy individuals and 
> organizations. Currently I have several thousand static html pages to 
> deal with ? these were built using a variety of techniques including 
> FrontPage, Mambo, CMSimple and others. The move will mean weeks of work.
>
It sounds like spending your time in getting to know the existing code
of projects that may or will die sooner or later is more fruitfull than
searching for *another* system, which you probably have to spend time
for to look at it.

Truely any project that remains vivid at it's root is usually because
users are desiring features or report bugs. And if the original authors
quit before that is all done, usually others pick up where they leave
(it depends on how important the project really is to *how many* people,
there are for sure a lot users among them that have the skill to pick up
where it was abandoned). And if there is no interest, it probably means
too less users with feature requests or serious bug reports. (Too much
to handle can also be a cause for developers to handle the occasion, but
this is a poor decision to make if such dev-team would not request for
backup)

If a program functions perfectly and you bump up against a renewal
requests that the current system you use, can't handle it while it was
already long dead, or simply not yet implemented, you can either choose
to move to a system that does handle it, or spend time into it to learn
how it works and how it can be expanded to make it do that you want.

And to give you a different angle of the story why it is useless to
switch from a dead project to a new one instead of learning to expand
the existing system:

I got into PmWiki 1.x, now i attempt to convert my PmWiki 1.x stuff to
version 2.0.
I don't need to worry about the existing data except for a few changes
here and there because interpretations are done differently. There are a
few converting scripts that do the task well and only require a few
rules in the config file.

I find the most cumbersome problems converting the style-sheets i
developed for the websystem since they don't go along as easily to the
new system and there are no convertion scripts made for them (to apply
at least changes to the original wiki tags the Wiki system listens to).

To make up a point:
Even a still live project can steal time from you, as PmWiki 1.x <>
PmWiki 2.x.

Regards,

Vincent. (Mr. Spam-funnel :P)