There is now a wiki for QubeKwest. It seemed to me like it would be a more useful format for storing large amounts of game related information than an arbitrary collection of blog posts would be. It took longer to get it working than I wanted, but it does work.
The adventure of getting a wiki up and running proved to be one fraught with peril. For a previous project (years ago) I installed MediaWiki (the wiki system used under the hood by wikipedia.org). I managed to get it to run, eventually, but the system kept its secrets close to its chest and I was unable to actually figure out how to actually use it. Before you get to judging me for that, I didn’t try all that hard.
With that in mind I decided to try a wiki system called Tiki. This proved to be a total nightmare. After several hours, I was still fighting with PHP extensions while trying to make it happy. It used package management software to help install additional things that had its own set of requirements. In the end I did finally manage to get it to work only to discover that the version the Tiki website told me to download as the latest version actually wasn’t. In fact, trying to use it, there were messages that popped up telling me the “latest” version I was using was actually so old it wasn’t supported anymore. I ended up starting over and installing it again from their SVN repository to get the nagging messages to go away. The final install size was almost 580MB!
After using Tiki for a few days, I ran into several things that I hated even more than installing it. As it turns out, the interface is a bit of a disaster, the online documentation is either completely wrong, for old versions, or is just generally misleading in some way or another. It was a convoluted mess just to get a search box to appear on a wiki. Can you imagine a wiki without search support right out of the box?
As I used it more, I ran into issue after issue. The way you have to use images is absolutely terrible. You have to upload them, which makes galleries, and then you have to refer to them basically by number if you want them to appear correctly. Pages in the wiki had horrible formats (I assume this was just by default and could be improved, but I wasn’t inclined to do so). The search results came up with nothing more than a page name and a spot that looked like it was going to have more information but didn’t.
The issues I experienced were surely just the tip of the ice berg since I’d only used it for a couple of days. I couldn’t take it anymore. I scrapped the entire Tiki install and installed MediaWiki. Amusingly, this time with vastly more success than my first time from years back. In fact, the install was fast and painless (just a few minutes), and using it has been absolutely great so far.
As for the actual wiki content that will go on the site, the amount of information we are talking about was almost instantly daunting. When I created a block type list page. That resulted in 331 wiki pages I will need to write, and that’s until I end up adding more block types. I suspect I will write a collection of small tools that is intimately aware of the data structures in QubeKwest to generate a bunch of the wiki pages for me. That would leave it to just copying and pasting or figuring out how to import them instead of having to hand write them all.
Over the course of “whenever I feel like it” I will document things on the wiki, and I’m glad to have the place to do that now. I’m calling that a little bit of progress.