Another quest for the perfect wiki

2006 March 5 at 05:08 » Tagged as :collaboration,

After using it for quite sometimes, I am convinced now that mediawiki is not the software to power to this site's wiki. So I am looking for a new one. The first victim of was TPWiki it's advertised as a really simple Wiki. The trouble is it's too simple. The exact opposite of mediawiki.

During the last round of wiki hunting, I think i took a look at Wikiwig, but there has been a new release since that time. That realease however dates from may 2005. Too long ago for comfort. Unlike the last time, this time I did come across english documentation but I couldn't quite figure out how to use wikiwig. Even though the wiki is sucesffully installed (it says so!), it keeps redirecting me to the installation page over and over again.

The third encounter was with Particle Wiki. The download is just 90K. Which means the software is either very well written or it's oversimplified like TPWiki. The download doesn't have a meaningfull name (1.0.2.zip) and it expands into a folder named complete! I did manage to get it installed and it does seem to work but you need to scratch your way around because the documentation is not complete. All in all this is something worthy of a second glance.

Now looking at PWP wiki. One of the features advertised is that pages can be exported into static HTML. That sounds like very good news cause wiki parsers really suck up a lot of memory and CPU specially if you are running a large wiki. The same applies to Content (mis)Management Systems.

The downside of PWP wiki is that it does not use a database. Secondly the documentation is a bit sketchy and it's not very obvious how a new page is to be created. URL rewrites of the kind found in mediawiki (which allows the elimination of '?' from the urls) may be possible here but they don't say how. I am not going to delete this just yet.