Mediawiki is written in PHP and is far more complex than MoinMoin, plus it's database backed, meaning you have to run an SQL server as well as the wiki software itself (MoinMoin just uses the file system). Plus, I'll guess that it really needs mod_php, while MoinMoin runs tolerably as a set of cgi's, at least when traffic is low.
MediaWiki should run with PHP configured in CGI handler mode, but these days mod_php has got its claws just about everywhere anyway. If you control your own server and don't have multi-user security worries, mod_php is simple enough to install and will probably perform better.
For performance I also highly recommend using Turck MMCache or equivalent PHP bytecode cache extension. Unlike Python, saving compiled bytecode is not the default behavior of PHP, and for non-trivial scripts compilation eats up a lot of runtime.
I'll say that I haven't actually looked at the Mediawiki code, though I guess I should do so.
Cover your eyes...! it _is_ PHP after all. ;)
What I'm getting at is I might like to install MoinMoin now and migrate to Mediawiki sometime later. Anyone have any thoughts about whether that's a crazy plan? Should I just bite the bullet and run Mediawiki from the beginning? Is anyone here actually running Mediawiki who can say just how big a hassle it is?
I would generally recommend you just start with MediaWiki if you intend to use it. To migrate a non-tiny site later you'll need to work out a migration script to import your data in some way (some people have asked about this in the past, I don't know if anyone's ever completed one or made it public).
On the other hand if you _do_ write a MoinMoin-to-MediaWiki conversion script (or vice-versa!) we'd love to include it in the MediaWiki distribution.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
