[Hidden-tech] Best wiki software?

[Jonathan Dill]

On 1/3/07, Jean Graef <jean.graef at montague.com> wrote:
> We are investigating wikis as a way of sharing & editing information with
> both internal staff and external clients & partners.
>
> We have some experience with a product called ProjectForum. It's pretty nice
> -- easy to install, easy to use, cross-platform.
>
> Can anyone recommend other options we should look at? We looking for
> something that will handle 10 - 12 groups.

There is a nice wiki search engine at http://wikimatrix.org there you
can search by various criteria such as files vs. particular db back
end, scripting language, or you can use the "wizard" to help you
choose.  http://opensourcecms.com/ also has online "demos" for most
wiki engines that you can try out and even trash, they get completely
refreshed periodically.  Any of the wikis that I will mention can be
found on one of those two websites.

If you are willing to go commercial, Confluence looks very nice and is
probably what I would use if I had the budget for it, it also
integrates nicely with some other tools.

I have also been curious about Google Docs & Spreadsheets for shared
projects, but haven't investigated into security, capability to
maintain local backups etc.

Finding good ACL support for separate groups is difficult to achieve
but possible--if groups are more or less separate, it may be easier to
just use separate instances.  TikiWiki seems to be the most
comprehensive and flexible, but it is also less portable and more
difficult to configure and manage.  TWiki, which is Perl based, isn't
bad, but if you want to run it off a flash drive for example, that is
more difficult to do because of the Perl environment.  eGroupWare has
an embedded version of TaviWiki, which I have used, but I have had
problems with the built-in editor not rendering or marking things up
correctly--the nice thing about it would be the integrated group
permissions system, option for LDAP back end, integration with other
groupware tools.

I use mainly use DokuWiki, which seems a bit slower than other Wiki
engines, but easy to make portable, you can even run it with nanoweb
PHP-based HTTP server from a USB flash drive or Portable XAMPP.

For one of my current projects, I am using MoinMoin, which is a
Python-based Wiki, and various tools from the Ubuntu Documentation
Team for converting fairly reversibly between DocBook XML Article
document type and MoinMoin Wiki markup.

Not strictly related to what you were asking about, I have found
TiddlyWiki to be very useful for small documentation projects.
TiddlyWiki is a completely self-contained JavaScript application that
runs in a browser.  I tend to "bundle" it with Portable Firefox (from
http://portableapps.com/) otherwise it is necessary to change Internet
Explorer browser settings for scripting, which isn't always possible
if you have Active Directory enforced security policies, and probably
not desireable.  Portable Firefox also obviates the need to "install"
anything on the customer's workstation(s) so you don't need
Administrator rights.  This way, I can just hand someone a USB key and
they have documentation they can use on any workstation, can easily
edit themselves, and there is no need for MS Office or Adobe or any
other proprietary tools.