Wiki-What?! DokuWiki: Good balance of features and usability
In simple term, a wiki is a web site (private or public), which can be edited (modified) by many people.
The king of wikis is of course Wikipedia, a giant wiki-based encyclopedia being assembled and refined constantly by a lot of editors. Not sure if you have noticed recently but the page rank of Wikipedia in Google seems to be increasing.
These days even Business Week writes about wikis:
Over a year ago, at my job, I started to look into how what features and types of wikis might be suited for us. I reviewed several comparisons:
- Wikipedia‘s (of course!)
- WikiMatrix‘s – a great resource which even allows you to follow a wizard-based filter to identify the wikis matching your criteria.
My criteria were:
- Must run on Windows (XP and Server)
- Good usability
- Should require little to no administration
- Should be easy to backup/restore and repair. This led me away from database, towards file system-based storage (the “xcopy” paradigm)
- Easy to extend without complex programming
This led me to DokuWiki.
It is based on PHP (I would have preferred Ruby, but the Ruby wikis were not as strong feature-wise). It is a breeze to setup. Works great with Windows Authentication at the IIS-level (even on XP).
I tested a wiki on my development workstation for a while. I am now preparing to create an internal, architecture-oriented wiki. My thinking goes like this:
- I can create an outline with key notions, standards, patterns, framework / approaches
- I could then have developers contribute content, samples, and help cross-link both to other internal sites or to the Internet.
- Contributions would be tracked using Windows authentication
- It would be easy to search the wiki and keep track of recent changes through features like RSS
Stay tuned!
