How to store wiki sites (vcs)
- by Eugen
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
