One wiki to rule them all...0

Posted by Bru March 14, 2006 8:26 PM

Halfway through moving codewitch to its new nest.
Time for the wiki.

I'm actually in the middle of a struggle about that: on one side I love wikis and think they could be really useful. Far more than blogs or, well, as much as blogs, but in a different way.
On the other hand, the loco wiki had little or no activity in a while, aside from the spambots that bug it from time to time.

The nice thing about wikis is they are community driven, or at least they should be. When it comes down to a personal context most of the time a blog or page's comments are more than enough to handle reviews (and yes, people still are somehow afraid of "screwing up things" and generally will prefer a forum thread even for purposes like collaboratively edit a document).

So the first question is to wiki or not to wiki?

But, seriously speaking, it would be probably pointless to give up on the wiki way now that it's finally getting somehow mainstream, so the answer is to wiki.

The second issue is then which wiki?
I tried more or less all of the main wiki engines out there, and still have to found my perfect catch.
The old version of codewitch wiki used to be a TWiki installation.
I'm pretty fond of TWiki and quite tempted to go on with it, but I've a concern about it being a big monster, full of features I'll never use. Then in the past I had issues with properly setting up authentication, and even if now it's all working nicely, I still feel a little burnt.
On the other hand, while in the office I'm a happy Confluence user, I sincerely don't think I could use it for my personal stuff... moreover my lovely neighbours wouldn't be happy to have this gargantua java dinosaur hanging out in the garden.
Other options include something rails (probably either i2 or Riki), which would be in mood with my current trend, but require some hacking on my side, or maybe the good old MediaWiki, which all know and love (but has no easy support for separated spaces, lives on an ugly syntax and definitely too community oriented).
Finally, there is trac, which even comes with trouble ticketing and svn integration, which would be great for pushing a little development on my side. But it's python, which scares me... And I'm not sure about the separate spaces too.

Basically the features I'm really looking for are:
. support for different webs (or spaces)
. Textile syntax
. comments
. and the occasional nice format editor for the lazy visitor
. the chance to hide single pages and share them only to a selected audience (the Backpack way) would be nice to have, too.

I think I'll spend some time browsing through the WikiMarix and make up my mind later tonight.

...and yes, of course there would also be the nice, amusing, charming option to code something with Catalyst and make the ultimate all-perl (together with the blog, that's going to stay in MT) solution... but with the current amount of free time that I'm willing to spend in coding, this is definitely going never leave dreamland ;)

Update: I played a little bit with the nice wizard on WikiMatrix, and it pointed me to oddmuse, I'll have a look at it. In the meanwhile, I installed trac (which on DreamHost is quite a loooong quest, luckily enough their support wiki is full of straightforward recipes)

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