Key Wiki Features
Posted in collaboration, windows, php Sat, 30 Jun 2007 17:11:00 GMT
I just installed MediaWiki at an organization to manage some information I was researching. The primary reasons I chose MediaWiki were (a) it's open source, (b) it has auto-TOC (table of contents), (c) it has auto-categorization and (d) I was familiar with it already. I ran into some rough spots during the Win2K3 R2 / IIS 6.0 installation getting PHP 5.2.3 and the php_mysql extension working but other than that the installation was pretty smooth. It seems that the php_mysql extension that comes with PHP 5.2.3 doesn't work and you need to get it from PHP 5.2.2. Also, rebooting after installing PHP from the MSI helps but that doesn't seem to be mentioned in the installer. The other issue is that IIS doesn't seem to come with rewrite capabilities so I tried a third-party rewrite filter before tabling that for now. It's hard to believe that IIS doesn't have rewrite capabilities.
Some "Enterprise Wiki" solutions include Confluence and SocialText but I don't have any experience with these.
Which wiki do you like for "enterprise" purposes and what features do you find to be key? Do any other wikis have auto-TOC?
Well, I’ve managed to get DokuWiki installed at us. The key benefits were: PHP and not database needed (and yes, it can do auto TOC). My problem is the lack of WYSIWYG editor (which scares many people) and the inability to search in comments. Some other options I’m considering (however, switching means that I’d have to find a way to convert the existing content): Socialtext (because it boast with all kind of “enterprisy” features) and TWiki (because it has many, many plugings). Hope this helps.
I also like DokuWiki. It’s auto-TOC is really nice.
If I have (ever) some free time, I will give SocialText Open a chance. It’s written in Perl and that’s what I like :-)
Thanks for the replies. I haven’t used DokuWiki or SocialText Open yet but they seem worth checking out. It would be nice if TWiki came with a nicer default theme as the existing one isn’t very presentable in an enterprise setting. The original MediaWiki theme (still shipped with the product) is very simple but the default one is pretty presentable.
The nice thing about PHP is that I have no incentive to hack on it. If I was using Perl or Ruby, I’d probably be thinking all kinds of ways to extend it when I should be doing other things ;)
Have a look at TWiki:
http://twiki.org/
Of course it has automatic TOC generation together with many, many other features:
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/WebHome
I’ve used it in an enterprise environment and I’m quite satisfied with it; though very mature and with a large user base, it’s still under very active development (as a plus, it’s written in Perl ;-) though its coding style is quite antiquated, so to say…
As for the key features in an enterprise-class wiki, they are too many to be mentioned here. They’re anyway more or less the ones listed in this site (which is also a good starting point to compare different wikis):
http://www.wikimatrix.org/
Cheers,
Emanuele.
Thanks for the post Emanuele. I just recently checked out the TWiki site and it seems to have had an upgrade since I last visited.
I’m actually looking for a KB solution now and TWiki looks interesting from that perspective because it was originally developed as a KB by TakeFive.
Are there any other KB solutions to consider?
A customly extended MoinMoin is nice for those who work with python easily.
I myself use WackoWiki for my projects, because it’s quite handy and oriented for project flow and discussions.
I also ran instiki a while ago on localhost, for personal todo management, but it is too simple and inflexible for my needs.