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Design and development of information management tools.

Trac for wiki

Hello again. It's time for me to continue my posts about wikis. I want to talk about Trac. I'm not using it, but I was tempted to. It's a nice web application that combines issue tracking, wiki and source code browsing. The only thing that it lacks is a forum.

Trac runs on Python. I'm sure it's a good language. Right now is not the time for me to learn it. I need the wiki to be able to run on IIS without any problems or need for advanced configuration. I would need to install Python modules to run it and this is an impediment for my adoptation of Trac.

It uses SQLite to store all data. That's a problem too. There's no simple way to export data from it and this was one of my main requirements.

The whole application is useful, but at this stage I have no need for its main features. I already have an issue manager (BugNet) and I don't see the point of moving all issues to Trac.

The wiki is not special in any particular way. It does support minor features I was looking for, such as macros and hierarchical pages structure. It doesn't seem to provide authentication or CAPTCHA support out of the box.

Conclusion

Trac looks very attractive. It's great application to manage a project, but I only need a wiki. I'm not using it mainly because there's no easy export. The fact that it's a Python application and I would need to configure IIS to run it doesn't help either.

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Readability Stats: Word Count: 264; Sentence Count: 23; Grade Level: 5.0, more info...
Published May 15 2006, 09:37 PM by Ornus
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Comments

 

Phil Wilson said:

I'm not a big Trac fan, but:

* it can run standalone _or_ behind a webserver like Apache/IIS
* it does support authentication out of the box, either running from hard-coded username/passwords or LDAP etc.
* SQLite is no more difficult to extract data from than MySQL - there are libraries in every language imaginable (Firefox 2 will use SQLite as its backend storage).

But otherwise, yeah, like you say, it's not special in any way, and I actually find its wiki syntax really really really annoying.
June 24, 2006 1:42 AM
 

Ornus said:

Hey. Thanks for the comment. I can't really comment about standalone or authentication. I guess I was wrong about authentication (although I was looking for form-based log-in).

With the export, SQLite does provide libraries, but not tools. For example MS SQL can save database or tables in different formats (CSV for example). I'm pretty sure MySQL can too. I understand SQLite cannot (I would have to write my own tool). Maybe I didn't do enough research, but I realized that Trac isn't for me. An export tool wouldn't have changed that.
June 24, 2006 6:16 AM

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About Ornus

Lead Sider and Xelog developer. I'm interested in information and how we can better manage it using computers. I'm also into design and understanding how to creating cool, useful, simple things.
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