The quest for the perfect wiki ends.

2004 Oct 6 at 03:35 » Tagged as :

My quest for the perfect wiki has finally ended. I have come a fully circle and finally decided to settle on mediawiki, the very product that I wanted to move away from.

The mediawiki project is full of features but it's rather complex. The complexity arises from the fact that it is the software that powers the Wikipedia, as a result it has to be many things to many people and perhaps not idealy suited for a small site like the site with the LAMP.

Then the Tavi project apears to be no less complex than the mediawiki but does not have as many features as mediawiki and it's very very slow.

The phpwiki has a good set of features and it's certainly very flexible but one essential feature was missing. Since I do not have the time to keep an eye out against vandals I wanted to restrict the ability to edit the wiki to registered users. Users should be able to sign themselves up. Unfortunatley this part of the coding has not yet been completed in PHPwiki otherwise this is definitely what I would have chosen.

I downloaded yet another wiki name wikiwig, unfortunately the documentation for this project turned out to be in a language I did not understand, so I could be sitting on a gold mine without knowing it.

So after looking at just these three projects I have decided to stick with mediawiki inspite of it's complexity and the fact that it uses mysql. After all there is a saying better the devil you know than the devil you don't. (I don't know the devil at all, haven't spent more than 10-15 hours on free BSD).

If you have seen my writings on perl or Java you might ask why didn't I look at wiki software written in these languages. Since I started coding in PHP 3 many years ago, I have been reluctant to use perl for web application and I feel J2EE would be overkilll for something this simple and there is also the fact that the server this site is hosted on does not included a servlet container.