MoinLight

MoinLight is a distribution of programs and libraries for working with content encoded in the MoinMoin wiki markup format. This markup format is generally concise and supports many kinds of HTML document features using intelligible plain text representations.

Although it is obviously possible to use the MoinMoin software (hereafter referred to as Moin) to work with such content, there are a few advantages in developing independent tools instead:

To eliminate any dependency on the Moin code, its bundled libraries, or on its external dependencies (of which there are many for Moin 2.0)
To focus on areas of functionality that are considered priorities, such as the publishing of content as static Web sites, which may not be adequately or optimally supported by Moin
To provide other implementations of parsers and serialisers for the markup format, thus establishing it as more genuinely interoperable markup standard
To be able to work with the content more easily and to develop tools for doing so

The wiki format is described in the syntax documentation.

Getting Started

To convert a collection of wiki pages in a directory (with pages containing the original pages and htdocs being the desired output directory), run the moinconvert program as follows:

moinconvert --input-dir pages --output-dir htdocs --all

To convert a single file from such a collection (such as FrontPage), run the program as follows:

moinconvert --input-dir pages FrontPage

This will produce the serialised page on standard output rather than writing it to a file.

Other options are typically useful when running the program, such as --theme for styling and wrapping the output, --macros for expanding macros in documents, and --format for choosing alternative output formats.

See moinconvert for more information on the moinconvert program.

Abstractions and Architecture

MoinLight provides a number of abstractions for working with Moin wiki content:

Input contexts permit the interpretation of existing content in certain ways so that a collection of text files can be treated like a wiki
Output contexts permit the publishing of content in certain ways so that wiki content can be shared on the Web
Macros define locations in documents where content is to be inserted or expanded
Metadata is used to configure the processing of content by defining the different abstractions involved
Parsers interpret various forms of markup-related content, producing a document tree representation that can be inspected and processed
Serialisers convert the document tree representation into other content formats such as HTML or even back into Moin format
Themes augment serialised content with additional details and resources

A major objective with MoinLight is to be able to produce static files that can be served using a typical Web server without any need for scripts, applications or other kinds of dynamic content. Other objectives are described in the Roadmap document.