[Zope-CMF] Migrating existing wiki content to CMFWiki / ZWiki

[Gordon Ingram]

Hello,

My company is quite small and its intranet system is pretty ad hoc. Most
technical information is shared using a wiki (MoinMoin). However we are
planning to upgrade what we've got and get some proper CM / portal type
functionality. We don't want to pay for a commercial CM system so I have
come up with two main options:
(i) building on what we have by adding MoinMoin extensions, creating custom
scripting and templates, and maybe integrating with CVS to get some simple
version control;
(ii) installing Zope, the CMF, and maybe Plone on top of that, with our
existing wiki content migrated into an instance of CMFWiki or ZWiki.

I think option (ii) would be great if we were building an intranet from
scratch. But does anyone know how easy it is to migrate existing content
into Zope? I've been playing with the ZMI a little bit and the whole
paradigm seems to be based on adding one object at a time. Clearly as I get
more familiar with Zope / Python I can write a script to add a load of wiki
pages automatically; but what I'm thinking is, if I'm going to be writing
scripts to migrate stuff into Zope, why not just write scripts to serve the
content in the first place? Neither I nor many other people here have much
experience of Python, so it might make more sense to have something that
runs in Perl or Tcl.

Also, MoinMoin stores content as plain text files in a flat directory
structure. Really simple to deal with. I had hoped that something similar
would apply with CMFWiki or Zwiki, which would have made it very easy to
move the stuff over. But I've tried adding a couple of test wiki pages to
CMFWiki and must confess that I'm perplexed as to where it actually stores
the things. Are they simply tucked away in the Zope database? I find this a
bit strange: would have expected to find metadata in the database and
content in the filesystem. It makes me worry about how easy it would be to
migrate content _out_ of Zope if we ever decided to drop it.

Any thoughts or comments are welcome. I really like the look of Zope and
would be quite keen on deploying it. However I'm worried about learning
curve and maintenance issues, given that nobody in my company has any real
experience of it.

Thanks,

Gordon Ingram
Technical Author
Orbis Technology Ltd, London
http://www.orbis-tech.co.uk
Tel: (0208) 742 1600