Announcing Wikked

There hasn’t been any updates on this blog for a few months, and there was a good reason for that: I was working on someting new.

The problem is that I was trying to get this new project to a “good enough” state to launch publicly… but somehow I ended up in a seemingly infinite loop of improvements, refactorings, and bug fixing.

Eventually I snapped out of it: fuck it, let’s launch it as is, and see if anybody cares enough to complain that it’s not good enough. I wrote some basic documentation, fought with setuptools for packaging, and uploaded it to the Python package server.

Wikked

So lo and behold, here is Wikked, a wiki engine entirely managed with text files sitting in a revision control system.

I think it’s pretty cool, so come read more about it after the break!

Quickstart

You’re too lazy to follow the link to the documentation? Here’s your quick start:

pip install wikked
wk init mywiki
cd mywiki
wk runserver

Text files again?

Yes, this is “Part 2” of my personal crusade to both learn about web technologies and have all my data in text files inside Mercurial or Git. I find it so much easier to manage and backup than some piece of data trapped in an SQL database or something.

It’s obviously not a magic bullet – for one, it doesn’t scale well – but for personal websites I find that it’s perfect.

What’s next

The plan for Wikked is to stabilize it, of course: fix any bugs, make it easier to deploy, make it more configurable. I’m also expecting having to add proper support for Git, as right now only Mercurial is fully supported to store page revisions.

Then, it needs a demo website. There’s one already, actually, but I need to make it a bit more solid, like a cron job that resets it to its original state every night.

Last, I want to get some proper feedback about the Wiki Syntax. It was mostly thrown together as I found I needed something for my own wiki, but I’m still not 100% happy about it.

Fly away, monkeys!

That’s it for now. Be sure to send me some feedback, and to report bugs. Especially the part about reporting bugs, because this thing has never seen any other computer than my laptop and my VPS, so it’s pretty much the mother of all “works on my machine”.

Enjoy! 🙂