If you haven’t been to our OS Resources page lately, you haven’t missed much action, because like many online resource pages, a lot of effort went into it long ago when it was launched, but it’s been lacking attention since, with only occasional updates. Alas, thus is the sorrow of Web 1.0. We’d like to drag OS Resources into the participatory web, and let the OSNews community help keep it up to date. Wiki seems like an obvious solution. So I’d like to ask, dear readers, is there a Wiki system that you think would be especially good for a small-but-growing OS Resource guide? There’s Mediawiki, of course, but it seems a bit heavyweight and user-unfriendly for something small and simple. I’ve had good experience with Mindtouch Deki, but thought I should examine other options before picking it. So what do you think? Is Wiki the way to go, if so, which one? And what would you like to see in our new OS Resources?
I’ve been meaning to try out DokuWiki, as I’ve heard great things about it…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software
I preferred Dokuwiki over MediaWiki, not sure why. Quite easy to setup and use. Also relies on text files for storage instead of a database.
It also might have less features that MediaWiki though.
Doku has a nice selection of plugins available for it, and they’re easy to install. All in all, it’s a good package that doesn’t require the overhead MediaWiki has.
FWIW, I was able to install DokuWiki and serve it from an extremely low-resource server. From memory, all that it required was the Cherokee web server and the DokuWiki php code.
I didn’t have an actual use for its capabilities, so I took it down.
I am currently running CMSimple instead, which is even lighter and even less capability, but it is all that I need.
I just set DokuWiki up last week for a small business, after looking at a half dozen options.
The template choices can really alter the appearance and functionality to your needs, and if you want to spend the time to mod one, you can get quite custom.
The data is all stored in text files, simple to backup and move. For this case, I used WAMPServer and just added it to one of their underutilized Win server boxes.
The thing is so lightweight, you could probably serve it from a Linux stamp, though. If you wanted.
If you don’t want to config WAMPServer, I do like the Turnkey Linux appliances, their LAMP server makes a great VM with low resource use (disk, ram).
Another vote for DokuWiki here. We use it for our more recent products’ online help and it’s very simple.
PmWiki (http://www.pmwiki.org) is fantastic, I use it myself and have never had a problem with it. One potential gotcha is that it’s method of handling authentications is a bit otherworldly, PmWiki does not actually support usernames and passwords by default, relying on third party “cookbooks” to do so.
I would assume that you want to integrate the proposed new wiki into the main http://www.osnews.com accounts system http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/AuthUserDbase might be able to help with that.
PmWiki also eschews databases, instead preferring flat-files. How you feel about this is up to you, I think its an asset, not everyone does.
Edited 2009-07-20 23:40 UTC
I’m not so sure about pmwiki. I use it myself, it is very easy to set up and yes, I agree with you that the use of plain text files instead of a database is an asset. But I feel that pmwiki is meant for simple environments with not so many users.
I don’t think we’re ambitious enough to integrate this wiki with the OSNews accounts. More likely we’ll make it anonymously editable, and have the separate logins for those people who might want to take credit for their edits or watch pages.
I don’t think that this is going to be a particularly huge resource, so flat files might be okay. But we’ve already got our DB running, so it wouldn’t have any particular advantage for us.
Edited 2009-07-20 23:56 UTC
I think that’s a mistake. OSNews eliminated anonymous responses for a reason, Why stop now?
Maybe I’m just being naive, but I think the stakes won’t be that high on the resources pages, because anything anyone posts that’s not acceptable can just be backed out.
I’ve seen Anonymous Wikis used for Porn, Viagra and many other things.
They are a pain to clean up because of the MASSIVE amounts of edits and additions they create.
Anonymous edits would seriously *SUCK*.
It’d better to just not have it if *that* is your reasoning.
Valid point, but there’s always the option of using a CAPTCHA (or reverse-CAPTCHA, ideally).
that would be a very bad idea, you will get wiki spammed quite a lot. sure it is easily backed out, but do you really want to be doing that daily?
you need to enforce logged edits with some sort of verification process for account creation if you don’t plan to integrate it with the regular osnews accounts.
i run a wiki using mediawiki (it’s the only one i’ve tried so i cannot really recommend it over any other one) and i had the wiki spam problem until enabling the CAPTCHA module and requiring the users be logged in to make edits
Pmwiki is rock-solid and a pleasure to use. Pm and the mailinglist are nice people always trying to help every question.
I would recomend it very much.
It also has a nice plugin (named cookbook) system, with very much diversity from the community.
Don’t expect wysiwyg. It’s not there.
I’ve used OpenWiki on my home machine and like it; alas, it’s an ASP application so I don’t think OSNews will work too well with it.
Don’t sell MediaWiki short, with the right extensions the program can fill the need for just about every need. As an example of the program’s abilities this is my favorite wiki site : http://asianmediawiki.com
TWiki – try it out.
I used to be a HUGE fan. Until certain things happened to the code base.
Theony has lost it. Huge huge idiotness has occurred in the project.
Loved twiki gives you alot of control
MoinMoin is very user-friendly. Definitely worth checking out. http://moinmo.in/
Edited 2009-07-21 03:18 UTC
It’s amazing. http://ikiwiki.info/
Is that a joke, or just genius? I can’t tell. I love minimization in all its aspects. I suggest everyone rewrite their websites with ikiwiki.
I second that, it is a great wiki system. Plain text (markdown), real version control (git, svn, etc), intuitive file system layout, and easily theme-able to any style:
http://cairographics.org
http://psas.pdx.edu
https://www.chaosdorf.de
I use both Twiki and MediaWiki at work at a large cell phone company. The official wiki is Twiki, and I would avoid it like the plague. It’s very slow and seems difficult to use.
My group uses MediaWiki for our groups wiki, and it’s wonderful! Fast and easy to use.
Mozilla uses TikiWiki as wiki system for their support system: http://support.mozilla.com/
For what I heard from its introduction there, it solves lots of features that I dislike about Mediawiki.
However, it could be too big for the purpose here at OSNews (because it can also do CMS, forums, blogs, etc).
You can turn WordPress into a Wiki with a plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-wiki/).
I have not tried it for now.
I wouldn call wp-wiki a wiki. It’s just a way to use wiki-commands in wordpress. nothing else.
A real wiki wouldn need the wp-admin interface to edit a page or even add one.
Yes, I tried it myself (;
Dokuwiki is both easy to install, easy to use, easy to maintain and powerful. I higly recommend it.
Build one in Symphony (http://symphony-cms.com) It’s cross between a framework and a CMS.
I’ve used DokuWiki for a long time and had no regrets.
Recently I wanted learn Python more seriously, and moved to MoinMoin so I could “eat my own dog food”.
I don’t think it’s as elegant as DokuWiki, but some features are extremely cool (macros in Python for instance).
You can use Wiki Matrix to see what’s available. Use the choice wizard to narrow down the list.
http://www.wikimatrix.org
I like dokuwiki for i’t simplicity and easy to install
we use it for flamerobin.org wiki also i see that php.net is using it
http://wiki.php.net
for firebirdsql.org wiki we use bitweaver
http://wiki.firebirdsql.org/
http://www.bitweaver.org/wiki/PoweredBy
also i studied wikipedia source code and i think it can be ported to firebird database , i wanted to use it for the main wiki
TiddlyWiki is a single html file which has all the characteristics of a wiki – including all of the content, the functionality (including editing, saving, tagging and searching) and the style sheet: http://tiddlywiki.com/#Features
You can add functionality by using various plugins, macros and other extensions: http://tiddlyvault.tiddlyspot.com/
Create your own powerful personal wiki for free in seconds with no installation required at http://tiddlyspot.com/
Why don’t you move the whole OSNews site over to Drupal!
If you are going to goto the effort of moving.
Its far more extensible and very much more “non-insane” in its approach to things.
Don’t get me wrong, JT can be a big PITA, but at least his stance on software is much more grounded in good (actually GREAT) design.
WebGUI does everything Drupal does, plus its got built in protections for things like slashdotting and other high Hit count/bandwidth SLAMMING.
Plus, its written in Perl (mod perl) and comes with its own “runtime” environment/deps for many OSes… Windows being absent now.
http://www.webgui.org
We have both DokuWiki and TWiki in production.
DokuWiki is younger and probably a little better, and I like it more these days…
but TWiki is solid, been around much longer and has pretty much every feature you can imagine at this point.
I would say your choice should come down to evaluating based on needs…like do you need LDAP authentication? Do you need better search, or file uploading etc..
Edited 2009-07-21 12:33 UTC
PmWiki is filesystem based. So, it’s as fast and as flexible as your filesystem. Also, unlike most that are based upon databases, PmWiki can take a slashdotting. Most db based wiki’s fail because most people are not DBAs and do not have a scalable db infrastructure that can take the punishment.
PmWiki has a fantastic community, it is well designed, easy to extend and use. You can pretty much make it do anything you need it to do. With that said, many are NOT looking for a flexible platform, but something that has lots of fancy looking toys (because people in general stink at creating actual content). I would argue that PmWiki is a wiki for people that generate content and are not afraid to extend it on their own.
PmWiki runs our site intranet portal. In our case authentication is used and done against multiple sources including AD.
When we have a need for a new feature, I write the feature and also put the extension up on pmwiki’s website for others to use as well. But we do have some extensions that are designed just to work with internal systems. We love it.
I work on a few wikis fulltime: http://elinux.org (based on Mediawiki), http://linux-sh.org (based on MoinMoin) and a new, in dev wiki for a Japanese company (based on Pukiwiki).
I’ve found Mediawiki to be the easiest to use and most comprehensive wiki software for the following reasons:
1. The Mediawiki community is top notch! The mediawiki-l dev mailing list, as well as #mediawiki on freenode are one of the most responsive FOSS communities I’ve yet to encounter. Questions are answered usually within minutes on the mailing list and immediately in IRC. And the primary developers are on IRC all the time.
2. Installation and upgrades are dead simple. And installation of extensions is as easy as un-tarring the code in an extensions directory and adding a require_once statement to your LocalSetting.php file.
3. Documentation is comprehensive! The mediawiki.org wiki is about as complete as it gets. As well, O’Reilly has published a very useful Mediawiki book.
4. All new changes to the code are tested live on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is always running the latest and greatest Mediawiki version, currently 1.16alpha-wmf. Therefore when a new stable revision is release, you know it’s been thoroughly tested on the largest wiki site by that time. You can see everything Wikipedia uses, including extensions here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version
Anyway, good luck with your wiki launch.
Cheers
Bill
There is something to be said about using a popular software. Someone completely new to Wiki might find something else easier but if a person has used Wikipedia before it will be very user-friendly. Using an easy to use but obscure Wiki might actually be more user-unfriendly than a harder to use but popular Wiki.
Sharepoint has an excellent template for this 🙂
I never found MediaWiki difficult to use, neither for an admin (as long as you have a little database knowledge) or a user. Granted, I’m running a couple small wikis in a work environment, but I have AD authentication working (via Kerberos) and even the ability to restrict access to groups or authenticated users. The permission system in MediaWiki is a little funky, but makes sense once you get the hang of it.
I set pmwiki up for our workgroup at the department I work and everyone find it easy to use.
I have no idea how it scales but it works very well for me and my team.
For very small and simple wikis I had some fun trying out pwyky (and the original wypy) and TinyWiki.
http://infomesh.net/pwyky/
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TinyWiki
I used them to put up a personal page. But eventually I decided I needed more, and became a happy DokuWiki user.
I’m running doku wiki on a router with 33Mhz. It’s pretty quick.
I work at a large company (50,000+ employees) and we switched to Mindtouch wiki for our lab documentation and department collaboration needs. We went through a couple of other wikis/products and they really never caught on. They were just too difficult to manage and content creation was just too tedious because of having to use special wiki syntax. Especially when content creators are time-limited, it is just too much to expect people to focus on learning wiki syntax rather than creating content for the wiki pages. After switching to Mindtouch, our department now relies on it for documentation, collaboration, and for communicating the results of our projects/papers to other departments within the company.
Also, it sounds like you guys (i.e. OSNews) are thinking of starting out with a small repository of information. Mindtouch would work well because it is dead easy to pick up and use for smaller information repositories, but also scales well performance-wise with large number of users and wiki pages (good if the OSNews wiki really began to take off).
Unlike other wikis, Mindtouch is developed by experienced software engineers. I won’t mention the names of other wikis, but there are a lot of other PHP-based wikis that are a mess code-wise (i.e. no use of good design and engineering principles).
Also, support through the mindtouch forums is invaluable. I don’t want to sound like a commercial, but I can’t recommend Mindtouch enough!
I forgot to mention some of the specific features of Mindtouch that are great:
-Fast AND scalable (easily runs within a VM or scales up to a larger deployment). There is a reason Mozilla is using it for their development wiki (https://developer.mozilla.org/En). Backend is C#/mono. Frontend is PHP.
-Hierarchical Taxonomy allows a site to easily change/grow over time (i.e. moving and re-organizing wiki pages is really simple)
-Active Directory integration
-File/Image attachment revisioning
-Extensive permissioning system (also integrates with Active directory).
-Great REST API for interfacing with the wiki if needed.
-WYSIWYG page editor. No need for everybody to learn wiki syntax to add something simple to the wiki.
-Global RSS feeds for site changes, etc. Individiaul RSS feeds for every user.
-PDF Export. All wiki pages can be exported to PDF
-Plugins. All kinds of plugins and extensions for Google, Flickr, Jira, Mantis, Trac, etc (http://developer.mindtouch.com/Deki/Extensions)
…just to name a few features 🙂
I’ve administered MoinMoin and MediaWiki. Here are my observations:
MoinMoin uses plain files; MediaWiki uses a database (MySQL apparently preferred). The MediaWiki people seem to think that plain files are a problem, but they’re a lot easier to work with if you’re doing batch stuff.
MoinMoin reformed their syntax a few versions ago; MediaWiki uses awful syntax which kind of degrades into a bastardized form of HTML and insists on stuff like [[Image:xxx]] with lots of tweaking required. This leads me to…
MoinMoin comes with half-decent help; MediaWiki doesn’t come with help and will have you horsing around getting the “public domain” help from their site and actually exporting it from their Wiki, then importing it into your Wiki.
The MoinMoin site seems a bit disorganised in places, but it’s quite a bit better than some of the “he says, she says” stuff going on in parts of the MediaWiki site. And I guess I’m a bit old school when I prefer to download releases of extensions rather than having to download virtually essential extensions as snapshots from someone’s personal Wiki somewhere, which is what I’ve seen with MediaWiki.
Yes, Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki in some server farm somewhere. There are a bunch of high profile MoinMoin sites, too: the Ubuntu Wiki at the very least is a MoinMoin site, and there are plenty more out there.
I’m using ScrewTurn 3 (http://www.screwturn.eu/) for a couple of projects at work; pretty great if you’re running on .NET or Mono. I have no major complaints about it, it’s easy to admin and it’s easy to write plugins.
– chrish
Oh, and I’m using Trac at home for something, but I don’t like its markup syntax… been considering putting Mono on my server so I can use ScrewTurn instead.
MindTouch would be a good solution for your community. We have many customers that use MindTouch as a knowledge base/documentation solution. A couple of good examples are:
RightScale: http://www.support.rightscale.com
Mozilla: http://developer.mozilla.org
Both sites are powered by MindTouch software. MindTouch’s open API allows for easy integration with external applications/web services so that you can add dynamic information into the documentation. Also we have tools that help improve documentation creation and updating like ScreenSteps and the Aurelia reporter which will publish to MindTouch from any application that prints. MindTouch being an open source project that stores all its information as XHTML ensures that it will grow with your community and not lock you into a proprietary format. If you have any questions about MindTouch as an option please feel free to contact us at support [at] mindtouch.com.
(disclaimer: I work for MindTouch)
I installed MindTouch (then known as DekiWiki) as a knowledge base for my company in Feb 2008. It is an absolutely fantastic platform for both use as a general purpose wiki for knowledge management, and as a “web application platform” – one line of its built-in scripting language (DekiScript) embeds the daily Dilbert comic, for example; using JQuery and DekiScript you can do some amazing things with data from all sources.
Integration with other software is a breeze – being able to extend it in either DekiScript, PHP or any .NET language is great. Deployment was trivial with a VM appliance. The support forums are great also.
Our use is just internal but there are some pretty high-profile deployments in the wild. I would recommend it without hesitation.