Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.Is the project still maintained?
Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.Is the project still maintained?
Comments
Comment #1
asb commentedHi,
with the latest release dated from 2008-Jan-01 and no development snapshots for D6 at all, I think this question answers itself.
Even worse: The project page starts with the note "Please consider using the flexifilter module instead of this before beginning use". That module - which is supposed to replace PEAR Wiki Filter - has a latest release "6.x-1.1-rc2" dating from 2008-Nov-22 (with an even more limited feature set than PEAR Wiki Filter ever had).
Pretty sad... greetings, -asb
Comment #2
asb commentedDear fellow Drupalers,
the PEAR Wiki Filter appears to be abandoned; the PEAR Wiki Filter offers a set of pretty mighty input filters and enables compatibility with MediaWiki syntax like it is used at all Wikimedia projects (namely Wikipedia itself); additionally, it enables nifty features like solid internal linking inside a path-aliased Drupal site and Image embedding. According to usage statistics, the module has gained a quite solid user base.
However, the current maintainers appear to be inactive in the issue queue; there are lots of unsolved issues and some patches that never made it into a *-dev release or into CVS-HEAD. Many people based their sites in the MediaWiki input format but see their projects to degrade slowly since the PEAR Wiki filter appear to be not actively maintained. From my experience it is not feasible to run PEAR Wiki Filter without seriously patching it; image embedding appears to be broken completely at the moment; compatibility to MediaWiki syntax does not exist anymore, at best a small subset is working.
Another indicator for abandoning the PEAR Wiki Filter module is a message on the project page saying: "Please consider using the flexifilter module instead of this before beginning use". However, many users are still bound to D5 or not satisfied by the (even more limited) feature set of the Flexifilter module; for serious use, Flexifilter is no alternative to PEAR Wiki Filter, especially when considering that Flexifilter is neither available for D5 nor actively maintained r developed itself (last release: 6.x-1.1-rc2 dating from 2008-Nov-22).
According to Dealing with abandoned projects I'm requesting to mark this project as abandoned and to be in search for a new maintainer. Based on Drupal standards I can not offer to take over maintainership since I'm no developer; however, I'd be willing to help out wherever possible and necessary. Marking this project as "abandoned" would be happening in hope of finding a capable volunteer that at least continues to maintain the project.
P.S. As an advanced user, administrator of several Drupal sites and advocat of Drupal in general I'm observering that an increasing number of mission-critial modules becomes unmaintained and abandoned. I'm experiencing this on a daily basis as far more problematic than esoteric usability studies or the drupal.org redesign - both are from my point of view useful and "nice to have", but not essential initiatives. Loosing content because of abandoned or unmaintained modules, or because of missing migration paths (there's still no migration path from "Amazontools" (D5) to "Amazon" (D6)), as suggested in forums and issue queues, becomes a serious problem. I consider it as serious bulls*it when time, energy and even money is wasted on new icons, when we do loose trust by leaving our users alone.
Thanks for your time, -asb
Comment #6
avpadernoThe project page already suggests the users to use an alternative module; this should be enough.
If you are willing to take over PEAR Wiki Filter, you can open a support request in the project issue queue.
Comment #7
asb commentedHi,
> The project page already suggests the users to use an alternative module; this should be enough.
Sorry, but I have to strongly disagree; the "alternative" suggested on the project page is - as explained in #2 - no working alternative; this module is neither functionally aequivalent to the PEAR Wiki filter, nor is it actively maintained and/or developed (last release 6.x-1.1-rc2 from 2008-Nov-23, lots of open issues).
If a module is neither actively developed nor actively maintained, it should be marked as "abandoned", as Dealing with abandoned projects suggests. I kindly ask you to reconsider.
> If you are willing to take over PEAR Wiki Filter, you can open a support request in the project issue queue.
I think this is not a question of being willing, but of being able to maintain a project; I'm simply not a software engineer and I do not write code, so IMHO it would not make much sense to maintain a software project.
I'm especially interested in not stealing anyone else's project. If there is anything I can do to help, including acting project maintainership to get new releases out, I'm open to suggestions.
Since there is a possible maintainer at 455100, I'm re-opening this issue.
Thanks & greetings,
-asb
Comment #8
avpadernoThe person has not express any interest in becoming co-maintainer of the module; if he would, then he should open a support request in the module queue, asking to become co-maintainer.
The decision to identify a module as abandoned is up to Drupal.org webmasters; this means that not all projects proposed to be marked as abandoned are then marked as abandoned.
Comment #14
asb commented> The person has not express any interest in becoming co-maintainer of the module [...]
However, you just granted this "uninterested person" CVS access: CVS account for adam-griffiths.
> [...] not all projects proposed to be marked as abandoned are then marked as abandoned [...]
My favourite candidate for the Most Famous Quotes Of All Times [tm]: Cool explanation, thorough reasoning. Perfect to communicate to users and customers.
-asb
Comment #15
avpadernoOn August 10th, rötzi, the maintainer of PEAR Wiki Filter asked to give a CVS account to adam-griffiths to make him co-maintainer of the project; on August 13th, adam-griffiths has been made co-maintainer of PEAR Wiki Filter.
rötzi opened the request after you opened yours; therefore, I could not reply differently to you.
The point is that the request to become co-maintainer needs to be done from the interested person, or the current maintainer; in this case, adam-griffiths applied for a CVS account after rötzi approved him to become co-maintainer.
As you are not the maintainer of the project, nor the person interested in becoming co-maintainer, you could not act in behalf of them.
The decision about which projects mark as abandoned is up to the Drupal.org site maintainers. If then a new co-maintainer is just added, then the project will not marked as abandoned for sure.