Wiki recommendations -- Practical Experience

[Luis Paulo]

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 6:46 PM,  <p.echols at comcast.net> wrote:
> Greetings:
>
> I have been reading up on some of the popular wikis.  I am looking for recommendation based on practical experience. Below are what I think I know so far:
>
> Basic Use Case:
> Intra-net wiki for project collaboration, production environment with two prime users and about a dozen max.  Goals are maintaining common "whiteboard to do lists" and project Collaboration.  Will be installed on an existing, working LAMP stack.
>
> Here are my "Requirements" in order of importance:
>
> 1. Easy for end Users.  The end users are NOT "computer people".  (Have basic office skills though)
> 2. Document output to hard-copy (preferably by hierarchy)
>   a. Can Export pages to O.O. or PDF
>   b  As an alternative to "a" can print pages to look like a word processing document, not a "web" document.
>   c. Or provides a document version control that can handle OO docs or MSWord
> (The major project involves creating materials for a board meetings, if the users can collaborate in the wiki that is great, but eventually they need to create hard copy packets for attendees)
> 3. Version regression
> 4. Flexibility to import various document / media types and format for display. (pdf, jpeg, spreadsheet . . .)
> 5. Configurable display
> 6. Easy to install and maintain.  Though I am not on the production team, I have to run the darn thing! (and not getting paid for it).
>
> Here are those I have read about so far with comments:
>
> MediaWiki : Looks like it may be overkill, and I did not find any info about exporting:
>
> Twiki : Lots of optional plugins, not clear that there are document exporters, but it does promise to provide document revision control (2.c.)  I'd be interested in knowing how that works.
>
> MoinMoin : Looks like a good candidate.  There is at least one exporter to OO format I could find.  I've closed their page at the moment, but I seem to recall that links need to be in CamelCase.  Not good for end product.
>
> TiddlyWikki : Underkill, no revision backup
>
> Ikiwiki, PMWiki, WikkaWikki, and Dokuwiki : these are some on line commentators "favorites" but I have given only cursory looks and run out of time to read until this evening.
>
> If anyone can share thoughts, I'd be grateful.

Hi

I use Mediawiki for a while now. I don't like it very much, but it's
as good as the next one regarding what I don't like.

I understand you want/need someone to give you an experienced help on
deciding what wiki to use. But you also ask for thoughts, and that's
what you'll get from me :)

I start with a partial definition of what is a wiki, for discussion
wiki allows to write things in plain text with a few "tricks" and the
wiki software produces a html page

And this do say
1. Your users will write text easy, but will take sometime to get used
to the "tricks". Those "tricks" will allow them to do headings, lists,
text formating (bold, italic, etc...), links, tables

2.
 a. make PDF is easy as print a html as PDF. Don't know any wiki that
produces OO. But if the result is html and OO format is XML, is a
matter of writing a transformation (like a XSLT). Don't know if it
exist, not saying it is easy.
 b. a web page can look as a word processing document, is a matter of
formatting, right?
 c. yes, there are a few. Don't know if it is easy to make them work
with other documents that are not their wiki pages.

For a and b he question is to print only the document, not the stuff
around it if it exists, with a formal aspect. Again, it's just html.
Creating a button that runs a script that produces and print a
transformed part of the page is not nothing out of this world. It may
even be already made.

3. Can't imagine a wiki without it. Think of administrating a wiki
without version regression. I get into your wiki and f**k a hundred
pages in a few minutes. You must have even more than simple version
regression, a regression by user/IP, for example. That because backup
is just what it is, You don't do it every hour, and you don't want to
loose what your responsible users did. At least you don't want to tell
them you lost it :)

4. AFAIK, in many wikis you may allow to insert html in the wiki text.
That will allow to do anything html can. And inserting images probably
exist in many if not all wikis. So you may add to list on 1 images,
objects, javascript code and more.
What I mean is you may be able to show, and even edit, spreadsheets on
your wiki as you do it with html.
But if you mean a link to a speadsheet file it will be direct.

5. Mediawiki uses a few conf values and templates. Many others will be similar

6. Install and maintain are two completely different things :) Install
you do once, next time is easier
And what is mantain? I need no answer, just think you should elaborate
on that for your sake.

If you don't have experience on wiki, I say install mediawiki (is not
difficult, but may not work at first time)
Think:
* You have several users (even if in a contained environment) making
changes any time in any page.
* You must have backup (I think)
* How to copy the wiki pages to a new computer?

That brings me to other requirements you may want to add
* User permissions - Can everyone edit (and see) every page? How does
the wiki deal with that?
* How/where do the software stores the data? I mean, usually is a
database, but some may use plain files on disk, others use a revision
control system, and there may be other ways I don't know of. It
matters at least for backup and migration. If you use mysql, it will
help if someone knows it well.
* Navigation - Many, if not all, wikis don't have that important
aspect of web developed as in a site, not by default. What is offered
is a Main Page, a search tool, and in some the possibility to
categorize pages (like using page tags).
Of course you may do it yourself.
* What language is it made with? That may be important if you imagine
you may tweak it, or if the configuration is very dependent of it.

In conclusion
If you don't have experience on wiki (you just said you read about it,
I think), go ahead an install one. Any.
wiki is just a text source and a html output :)

Sorry to bother you.
Regards
Luis