How to store wiki sites (vcs)

Question

Hello,

as a personal project I am trying to write a wiki with the help of django. I'm a beginner when it comes to web development. I am at the (early) point where I need to decide how to store the wiki sites. I have three approaches in mind and would like to know your suggestion.

Flat files

I considered a flat file approach with a version control system like git or mercurial. Firstly, I would have some example wikis to look at like http://hatta.sheep.art.pl/. Secondly, the vcs would probably deal with editing conflicts and keeping the edit history, so I would not have to reinvent the wheel. And thirdly, I could probably easily clone the wiki repository, so I (or for that matter others) can have an offline copy of the wiki.

On the other hand, as far as I know, I can not use django models with flat files. Then, if I wanted to add fields to a wiki site, like a category, I would need to somehow keep a reference to that flat file in order to associate the fields in the database with the flat file. Besides, I don't know if it is a good idea to have all the wiki sites in one repository. I imagine it is more natural to have kind of like a repository per wiki site resp. file. Last but not least, I'm not sure, but I think using flat files would limit my deploying capabilities because web hosts maybe don't allow creating files (I'm thinking, for example, of Google App Engine)

Storing in a database

By storing the wiki sites in the database I can utilize django models and associate arbitrary fields with the wiki site. I probably would also have an easier life deploying the wiki. But I would not get vcs features like history and conflict resolving per se. I searched for django-extensions to help me and I found django-reversion. However, I do not fully understand if it fit my needs. Does it track model changes like for example if I change the django model file, or does it track the content of the models (which would fit my need). Plus, I do not see if django reversion would help me with edit conflicts.

Storing a vcs repository in a database field

This would be my ideal solution. It would combine the advantages of both previous approaches without the disadvantages. That is; I would have vcs features but I would save the wiki sites in a database. The problem is: I have no idea how feasible that is. I just imagine saving a wiki site/source together with a git/mercurial repository in a database field. Yet, I somehow doubt database fields work like that.

So, I'm open for any other approaches but this is what I came up with. Also, if you're interested, you can find the crappy early test I'm working on here http://github.com/eugenkiss/instantwiki-test

Answer 1

Creating a wiki is fun and rewarding, but there are a lot of prebuilt wiki software packages already. I suggest Wikipedia's List of wiki software. In particular, MoinMoin and Trac are good. Finally, John Sutherland has made a wiki using Django.

Answer 2

In none of your choices have you considered whether you wish to be able to search your wiki. If this is a consideration, having the 'live' copy of each page in a database with full text search would be hugely beneficial. For this reason, I would personally go with storing the pages in a database every time - otherwise you'll have to create your own index somewhere.

As far as version logging goes, you only need store the live copy in an indexable format. You could automatically create a history item within your 'page' model when an changed page is written back to the database. You can cut down on the storage overhead of earlier page revisions by compressing the data, should this become necessary.

If you're expecting a massive amount of change logging, you might want to read this answer here:

How does one store history of edits effectively?