Shreyas Ragavan: 2022-09-01-233026 General notes on ikiwiki

[2022-09-01 Thu 23:30]

OddmuseWiki PublishingOnline CodeJournal SoftwareNotes?

Ikiwiki has more built-in facilities to create blog posts of mixed content (text with pictures) and organise pages with some more modularity than the date-in-page-name approach used in oddmuse. Tags and nested subpages, and linked pages, including a breadcrumb of links to the page would appear better supported in comparison, and there are also more login mechanisms. This is despite the fair number of features already available in Oddmuse for blogging.

Though it may appear from the ikiwiki user space that a number of projects are actually using ikiwiki as their wiki of choice - most of the sites listed in the ikiwiki user page do not use ikiwiki anymore and have moved on.

Some things of note:

The useful ability to use git based version control, (though this is somewhat possible using oddmuse as well), which can be used to rebuild the wiki and migrate posts back to say, Hugo (if ever it is required).
Optional web based editing instead of being focused only on git. I like this feature for several reasons, the main ones being the ability for easy editing of pages for both technical and non-technical users and facilitating more meaningful collaboration, when it is applicable.
a sitemap can be automatically generated using the map directive, which can exclude specified pages. There are also some other useful directives which can be applied based on the page spec.
Though ikiwiki is based on perl, it also appears possible to write plugins in Python, which would be interesting.
Xapian based searching (and maybe also possible to use other search engines). This is definitely a strong plus point!
Album and gallery plugin, and apparently better handling of photos in posts out of the box (compared to oddmuse).
Atleast one disadvantage of using ikiwiki as a blog would be that blog post links would probably need to have a hierarchy and some kind of fixed link, based on date, which means this would have to be followed if the content ever moves elsewhere.
There is is some kind of org mode parser, which means that org files can be directly used. Though convenient, I think this opens up a can of worms, in the sense of the effort involved in getting Org mode syntax to render as expected. Beyond this, the wiki user has yet another syntax to learn.

There are not all that many ikiwiki blogs out there that are aesthetically appealing (or even updated any more). These are few that are exceptions, and it would be actually hard to tell that these are ikiwiki based!

On the whole, Ikiwiki is actually feature rich, and very interesting but unfortunately not very well maintained, not driven by an active community. Though the ikiwiki forum is somewhat active, this particular forum post - Some thoughts about Ikiwiki, provides a instructive 'feel' for the idea that any customisation of Ikiwiki presents certain challenges if one has no knowledge of Perl, and the relatively lower amount of activity would make this harder. It also points towards another interesting SSG based on Python called staticsite. Another old forum post, talks about a possible plan to rewrite ikiwiki in haskell so as to be more performant. (PythonNotes)

Lack of maintenance by itself need not be an indication of dying software. Sometimes, the software could be feature complete and serve a certain purpose perfectly. There may be no more incentive or motivation to continue developing it anymore, especially if the main contributor's itch is satisfied with whatever exists.