My notes on Moin Moin

Below are just some appointments that I had made while working/studying MoinMoin wiki in December.

Just download and install it?

Downloading MoinMoin Wiki comes with a very nice message saying: 'You also need to apply this bugfix patch, sorry.' Which meant nothing to me, because I had never applied a patch before. And, really, that is not very welcoming to new people, it makes me wonder why couldn't they just provide a final corrected version of the code for instalation? But, anyway, I had to learn how to do that.

Applying a patch on GNU/Linux

At first, I had a bit of trouble trying to figure out what 'applying a patch' meant in practical terms (what I had to do to apply them). I had created a patch before, when contributing to some translations, but I had never applied a patch.

I searched online for a bit and... it ended up not being as difficult as it sounds (but it would be so much easier not having to do it to begin with). First of all, I had to find the 'raw commit' on the link provided and download the file to the moinmoin directory. Not only that, but this file should be saved with a .diff extension, for instance: patch_file.diff.

Then, inside the directory the command patch should be used:

patch -p1 < patch_file.diff

And done! Patch applied to all the four files.

Categories

From my understanding, to use EventCalendar, at least a page inside a category had to be created.

To insert an event, insert the event information in any pages of specified category (CategoryEventCalendar by default). https://moinmo.in/MacroMarket/EventCalendar

That meant I had to play a bit with MoinMoin and get familiarized on how to use it. Sure, I had used a wiki before (Wikipedia and, as I mentioned in another post, ikiwiki). I spend a whole day just doing that, learning how to create new categories on this wiki and creating new pages, inserting the new pages in a category, listing them and such. Was CategoryCategory a thing? Should I just write EventCalendar or CategoryEventCalendar? This last one won, because that seems to be the pattern for the MoinMoin website itself.

Still on Macros

A macro is entered as wiki markup and it processes a few parameters to generate an output, which is displayed in the content area.

MoinMoin allows two types of macros:

• Standard macros Standard macros are macros which code comes with MoinMoin code. They are ready to use.

Macros reside in MoinMoin/macro and data/plugin/macro.

The macro object can access the following objects:

macro.request (see MoinMoin/request)

http://hg.moinmo.in/moin/1.8?f=-1;file=MoinMoin/request

macro.formatter (see MoinMoin/formatter for API)

http://hg.moinmo.in/moin/1.8?f=-1;file=MoinMoin/formatter

macro.formatter.page (see MoinMoin/Page.py)

http://hg.moinmo.in/moin/1.8?f=-1;file=MoinMoin/Page.py

Macros should use macro.formatter to create the output and return it.

That makes sense, now. EmbedContent uses this macro.formatter and EventCalendar uses it as well. This is called when the macro is executed (on EventCalendar, it calls a setglobalvalues function and uses global variables to it).

• Macros from the macro market This is the place to find new macros - and to publish macros developed by the community. There are some guidance for developers, talking about security and documentation, not to mention on how to publish there (create a wiki page).

Macros from the macro market have to be downloaded and put on the correct directory where MoinMoin wiki is installed to work. I noticed that, for some reason, wget can't be used to download the .py file with the macro code, which sucks when you're using just a terminal on a server.