[Discuss] Creating a Wiki server

[david3d at gmail.com (David Miller)]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 8:14 PM, Brendan Kidwell <brendan at glump.net> wrote:

> Joining in late in the discussion, but since no one else mentioned it,
> allow
> me to endorse DokuWiki < http://www.dokuwiki.org/ >. I'm not sure if
> MediaWiki has yet managed to create a clear plugin protocol and API -- last
> time I checked, MediaWiki plugins were rather ad-hoc compared to DokuWiki.
>
> DokuWiki has a healthy set of third-party plugins using official
> integration
> points (and being packagable and uninstallable). DokuWiki uses the
> filesystem for storage of pages, attachments, gzipped old versions, and a
> binary index. It requires only PHP and a web server and uses no cron jobs
> or
> databases. In short, it's easy to setup and try out.
>
> DokuWiki supports namespaces (in a tree structure), wiki syntax extensions
> (including source code coloring), page history, access control lists,
> scripted plugin/extension installation, and more.
>
> In terms of scalability, I'd say DokuWiki's sweet spots are
> personal/department web sites and project documentation. Thousands of
> readers, a handful of writers, and at most hundreds of pages.
>
> I use DokuWiki to publish my personal web site.


Definitely take your time and vet out a few different wiki solutions before
choosing one.  Migrating a wiki from one platform to another is a big pita.
 While MediaWiki is probably the most well known in my opinion it falls
short for corporate use b/c it's lacking two major features. That's ACL's
and a WYSIWYG editor.  Yes both of these can be taken care of with plugins
but I don't know that I would trust something as important as access control
to a plugin.  In fact there are plenty of warnings on MediaWiki's ACL plugin
pages.

DokuWiki is definitely worth a look if you're taking the time to vet out a
few candidate solutions.  Another wiki worth a look is MoinMoin.  I won't go
on about all it's features as that's easy enough to look up yourself.  But
it has a very similar feature set compared to DokuWiki but is python based.
 It has quite a few high profile users such as the Apache Foundation and
Ubuntu.
--
David