smeagol/resources/public/content/Introduction.md

3.3 KiB

Welcome to Smeagol!

Smeagol is a simple Wiki engine inspired by Gollum. Gollum is a Wiki engine written in Ruby, which uses a number of simple text formats including Markdown, which uses Git to provide versioning and backup. I needed a new Wiki for a project and thought Gollum would be ideal - but unfortunately it doesn't provide user authentication, which I needed, and it was simpler for me to reimplement the bits I did need in Clojure than to modify Gollum.

So at this stage Smeagol is a Wiki engine written in Clojure which uses Markdown as its text format, which does have user authentication, and which uses Git as its versioning and backup system.

DLL Hell

Unfortunately, Smeagol currently uses clj-jgit for Git integration, and clj-jgit depends on an obsolete version (0.5.3) of org.clojure/core.memoize, whereas other components of the system rely on the current (0.5.6) version. This conflict currently makes it tricky to do an out-of-the-box build of Smeagol. You need to check out clj-jgit and build a custom build, depending on the current, not the obsolete, version of memoize. I'm working to fix this problem.

Markup syntax

Smeagol uses the Markdown format as provided by markdown-clj, with the addition that anything enclosed in double square brackets, like this, will be treated as a link into the wiki.

Security and authentication

Currently security is very weak. There is currently a file called passwd in the resources/public directory, which contains a clojure map of which maps username to maps with plain-text passwords and emails thus:

{:admin {:password "admin" :email "admin@localhost"}
 :adam {:password "secret" :email "adam@localhost"}}

that is to say, the username is a keyword and the corresponding password is a string. Obviously, this is a temporary solution while in development which I will fix later.

Todo

  • Currently, you need to do a 'git init' in the resources/public/content directory to initialise a git repository there - it should automatically create one if none exists, but does not currently do this;
  • Image (and other media) upload;
  • Improved editor. The editor is at present very primitive - right back from the beginnings of the Web. It would be nice to have a rich embedded editor like Hallo or Aloha but I haven't (yet) had time to integrate them!
  • Improved security. Having the passwords in plain text rather than encrypted is just basically poor; having the passwd file in public space is also poor (although I believe it cannot be accessed via HTTP). Essentially, authentication mechanisms should be pluggable, and at present they aren't;
  • Mechanism to add users through the user interface;
  • Mechanism to change passwords through the user interface;

License

Copyright © 2014 Simon Brooke. Licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or (at your option) any later version.

Editing the framing content

You can edit the _left-bar, the _edit-left-bar, and the _header.