Glossary

acl: Access Control List - you can use it to specify who may do what in your wiki.
contenttype: A formal, standardized way of specifying the type of some data. For example, ‘text/plain;charset=UTF-8’ is the contenttype for a simple piece of text (encoded using UTF-8), and ‘image/png’ is the contenttype for a PNG image.
data: Just the raw data, no more, no less; it can be text, an image, or a PDF.
emeraldtree: An XML/tree processing library used by Moin.
flask: A microframework used by Moin.
item: A generic, revisioned object stored in your wiki storage.
jinja: A templating engine used by Moin (Jinja2).
metadata: Additional information related to or about some data. For example, if you create a new PDF item revision, the revision data will be the PDF file’s content, but Moin will also store revision metadata that indicates this revision is a PDF (its contenttype - we do not rely on or require a .pdf extension in the item name), when it was saved, any comment you provided when saving, etc.
revision: Part of an item’s history, has metadata and data created for this item at some specific time in its history. If you create an item, you create its first revision. If you edit it and save, you create its next revision.
session: As the protocol (HTTP) used by web browsers is stateless, a way to keep state is needed. This is usually done by using a cookie stored in the user’s browser. It is used, for example, to stay logged in to your user account, to store the trail of items you visited, and for easier navigation.
sqlalchemy: An SQL database abstraction library used by Moin (SQLAlchemy).
sqlite: An easy-to-use SQL database used by Moin (SQLite).
werkzeug: A WSGI library used by Moin (Werkzeug).
wiki engine: Software used to run a wiki site.
wiki farm: Running multiple wikis together on one server. Often, there is some shared, common configuration inherited by all wikis, so each individual wiki’s configuration becomes rather small.
wiki instance: All configuration and data related to a single wiki.
wiki item: A single content item within a wiki site.
wiki page: A single content item within a wiki site, possibly used for text-like items.
wiki site: A web site implemented using a wiki engine.
WSGI: Web Server Gateway Interface. It is a specification for how web servers, such as Apache with mod_wsgi, communicate with web applications, such as MoinMoin. It is a Python standard, described in detail in PEP 333.