I’ve been talking to a few folks over the last few months about porting mediawiki over to PostgreSQL, something I’ve actually wanted to do for a long time as I’ve always thought it was a shame that wikipedia was so darn slow and could really use the performance increase that switching to PostgreSQL could give it.
These efforts culminated this week by the mere chance that I ran into Dennis Lubert on irc who happened to also be working on porting mediawiki over to PostgreSQL, and so with a little collaboration we both now have running mediawiki 1.6 CVS source installs. It’s really just the first step, but it’s important because I do believe anyone can now get this installed (yes, i do believe the gui installer should work) which means we can probably get some more eyeballs looking at the code. This is important because the code is pretty hairy!
So the plan now is to see if we can get a few more people to go through the install and look for any troubles, then I’ll see about getting patches pushed back to the mediawiki developers. If you’d like to help out, you can access the current code on our project page up on pgfoundry.