Okay, so round one of the wiki improvments are complete! At the request of the documentation team we enabled searching by default on various namespaces, of course, you most likely won't notice it at all.

Round 2 of wiki improvements start tomorrow, this is the exciting one. We are trashing the current authentication method IN THE BIN! No more htaccess prompts - YAY!

Whats going in it's place? The standard Mediawiki login prompt, it'll still be connected to FAS, it'll just look different.

This has several benefits for us, it makes it easier for us to enable features such as the edit API in the future and makes the wiki _a lot_ more standard.

Karsten Wade also summed up a topic I've been commenting on too, which would be round three of wiki improvements, that's the migration from our current ACL based system for protecting certain pages (such of Packaging Guidelines and Legal pages), this content really needs to be in a separate CMS.

The 10 million dollar question is WHY?, Round 2 will provide speed improvements (I'd estimate a good few ms) and make it look a LOT better.

Round 3 (CMS) will provide significant speed improvments however, testing shows the wiki as been on average THREE times faster without the ACL system, than with.

3x is significant, it'll allow more reliable caching of content, so I can't wait.

Check out:

• Karsten's wonderful post of what we require in a CMS


• Follow up to fedora-websites-list


• My consise post on why we need to do it

As a last thought, consider: Is it _really_ ideal that we have to wait 3 times as long to access content because we keep small amounts of documentation that "has to be ACLed"? I think not, it puts too much strain on the server. Whats your opinion?

Tags: cms, fedora, informative, mediawiki, wiki