Using Redmine with an external Wiki?

Question

We've got a company wiki running Mediawiki on our intranet that has been in use for a while. We just recently installed Redmine and are in the process of getting it configured just the way we like it.

I was wondering if there's any way to use our already existing wiki instead of the built-in one that comes with Redmine. We've got alot of articles & documentation written by non-developers and don't want to lose and/or re-import into another wiki (ie redmine's). The Wiki portion of redmine will not allow me to enter the url for the external wiki as it includes various illegal characters (mainly : and /)

Edit: As a temporary work around, I've just used each project main page on the "external" Wiki as the Projects "Home Page" in Red Mine, so far this is the best I've been able to figure out. You don't get Wiki access from the various issues & what not, but the link to our other Wiki does show under the Overview for each project now.

Btw, both of these are installed on the same physical box, a Windows 2003 Server, where Mediawiki was installed using a WAMP package, and Redmine was installed pretty much manually instead of using a stack like Bitnami.

Answer 1

Did you see this MediaWiki integration patch for Redmine? http://www.redmine.org/attachments/572/redmine-mediawiki.patch and its reference page http://www.redmine.org/issues/617 I have not used it so im not sure if it meets your needs but it might be worth a shot. (Be sure to backup first)

The reference page says this about the patch:

Here's a patch for 0.7 that will add a MediaWiki tab to your project settings and integrate it into the issues pages. You will also need to add:

is_mediawiki tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '0', mediawikiurl varchar(255) NOT NULL default '', mediawikinamespace varchar(255) NOT NULL default ''

To the projects table for this to work.

I know you didn't want to import but just in case someone else did here is a rake file for importing MediaWiki pages into Redmine http://www.redmine.org/issues/1224

Answer 2

We looked into this as an option since there are so many tools that work with mediawiki however we decided not to pursue the option since we already had so many issues and wiki pages in redmine. As far as I can tell, this patch replaces the existing redmine wiki input boxes with mediawiki boxes. This is done not only in the wiki section but also for issues and documents. We were afraid of:

1. Losing all of our existing wiki pages, and issue descriptions.
2. The whole thing breaking as Redmine updates are posted and installed.

We have found that the newest Wiki Extensions plug in http://www.r-labs.org/projects/r-labs/wiki/Wiki_Extensions_en has given us most of the features we wanted for the wiki part. It has comments, voting, tags, and many other things. It works well with the latest version of Redmine.

We still are trying to find a good way to import into the wiki all of our existing documentation from word.