Python Web Documentation Project

I'm pleased to announce the launch of a new wiki for Pylons documentation at http://docs.pythonweb.org.

The project has two main aims:

1. To provide a better collaborative environment for community driven content
2. To bring the documentation for the all the components which might be used in Pylons applications together in one place

Ben Bangert, Philip Jenvey and others from the Pylons community spent quite a lot of time discussing how best to achieve this and eventually decided to go with a wiki system called Confluence. It is a fairly sophisticated system which allows different areas for each user and allows pages to be arranged in hierarchies. Importantly for us it also has a full XML-RPC interface so over time we should be able to port across and maintain all the existing documentation automatically.

On the downside Confluence is actually a commercial product written in Java but it is available for free to Open Source projects. Being Java it uses a huge amount of memory so I had to order a dedicated 512Mb slice from SliceHost in order to host it!

For those of you interested in the architecture it runs on a Xen virtual host using Apache Tomcat behind a Squid cache, the wiki content is backed up nightly to a remote server using rsync over SSH and a crontab script.

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