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Softpanorama Perl Bulletin, 2004

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This is a very limited coverage of old Perl news. For a better source of Perl news for 2004 please check  Perl.com

[Dec 26, 2004] http://ppt.perl.org/ Do you know about the Perl Power Tools, at and mirrored various other places?

It is a great project to implement versions of standard Unix tools in pure Perl, so that they can run anywhere Perl does. Those utilities might be perfect for those who like me I prefer Unix/Linux as the development platforms, but Windows for my desktop. They also might be an alternative to the Cygwin stuff even for those who do not use Perl for own scripting. They should be the alternative for those who does use Perl. Once Perl has been installed the PPT stuff only needs to be copied somewhere and that directory added to the PATH. You can also learn some great Perl coding tricks by reading the PPT utilities. Thanks for the anonymous feedback to the Softpanorama for this info.

perl.com Perl Command-Line Options

Perl has a large number of command-line options that can help to make your programs more concise and open up many new possibilities for one-off command-line scripts using Perl. In this article we'll look at some of the most useful of these.

ONLamp.com Which Open Source Wiki Works For You

Kwiki

The Kwiki motto is a "A Quickie Wiki that's not Tricky." Installing it is pretty straightforward for a site you admin: just install the Perl package (from CPAN or elsewhere), and then type kwiki-install in a CGI-served directory to create an instance. Installing Kwiki on a server you are not an admin of is more complicated but doable.

I found the Kwiki markup not powerful. Some things are impossible with it, such as hyperlinking an arbitrary piece of text to an email address (mail fooish). I also could not find how to link a Wiki page with a text link different from the Wiki page name (like this link to LinkedWikiWikiPage). There is also no support for attachments, HTML markup as an alternative to the Wiki markup, etc. It is disappointing.

Kwiki can use either RCS or Subversion for version control. (Those who wish to use Subversion should check out the corrected Kwiki version as the CPAN Kwiki does not work with the up-to-date Subversion.) Kwiki is easily customizable and has several Kwiki enhancements available. Generally, however, they are less powerful than TWiki's.

All in all, Kwiki is easy to install and customize, but its formatting rules are lacking.

... ... ...

UseModWiki

UseModWiki is a Wiki engine written in Perl. Anecdotally, Wikipedia used this first before re-implementing their current engine. Other sites also use UseModWiki.

UseModWiki is very simple to set up and upgrade. It has a rich syntax, and allows for arbitrary characters in page names. It also supports using some HTML tags instead of the WikiWiki markup. It has other nice features, including search, a list of recent changes, and page history.

For simple Wikis, UseModWiki is a very good choice. I recommend choosing between it and PmWiki based on the feature list of both Wikis.