wiki software selection advice ?

External Since: Mar 27, 2007 Posts: 2

We have a short list of wiki software listed below that we are
evaluating. The project will also be using wordpress and there will
need to be some integration between the wiki and wordpress. It seems a
wiki that can use mysql and is also PHP based would be favorable.

I had also considered DBM/DBA which are object persistent databases,
but our team does not seem to favor that solution, though I have not
really analyzed that approach or have enough experience to feel I
understand all possible advantages or disadvantages that it might
have. I have not been able to find a DBM that works with PHP on
windows which some development will be on. It has been mentioned that
DBA is not going to cache the way a database does, although I also
heard somewhere else it would be faster and I suspect using memcache
with DBA would work, but I am not sure if there would be references
inside the objects that would cause a problem with that ?

I had looked into phpwiki, but had many problems with the install on
windows and I didn't see that it have very good wysiwyg editing.

Anyway, the short list:

mediawiki
bitweaver
jspwiki
snipsnap

pmwiki is set up to use flatfiles, so we may be dropping that,
although possibly it could be modified to work with mysql.

External Since: Mar 27, 2007 Posts: 2

On Mar 27, 9:17 pm, SueDoeCyAnts <pseud... DeleteThis @labb.port5.com> wrote:
> on Tue 27 Mar 2007 09:10:05a
> "wbsurf...@yahoo.com" <wbsurf... DeleteThis @gmail.com> posted
> innews:1175011805.770577.206210@p77g2000hsh.googlegroups.com:
>
> > Anyway, the short list:
>
> > mediawiki
> > bitweaver
> > jspwiki
> > snipsnap
>
> Even without your providing any sense of the total project size
> for it document base, its usage or the server you plan to run it
> on, it seems to me that you've elimimnated both snipsnap and
> jspwiki, as both are java based. Jspwiki requires a servlet
> engine, and snipsnap looks as if it's a miniwiki, possibly not
> what you're looking for.
>
> Meidiawiki is the backend that wikipedia runs on. It is probably
> the software that most would cosider to be the wiki standard on
> the web. it will scale, has a very good versioning and editing
> system, as well as many extras. If your team has a couple of
> decent PHP coders. It should be able to do anything a wiki is
> expected to do without much extra fuss. A possible downside is
> unless there is some serious template modifications, it will look
> like a media wiki product a first glance to any who are aware of a
> few mediawiki run sites. I do not know if there is a wordpress
> accessibile method readily available for mediawiki, but given that
> both sites are actively deve;loped, and both have a large number
> of coders, I'd be surprised if there wasn't something available
> from at least one side, and possible both.
>
> BitWeaver is a very nice complete CMS package, which includes a
> wiki engine. I cannot recall ever having messed around with the
> bitweaver wiki, but I would assume it is of the same quality as
> the parts of the package I am more familiar with and would expect
> setup and default usability to be easy for a CMS package. It uses
> smarty as it templating engine. Whether that is a positigve or
> negative depends entirely on the past experience of your team
> members. Smarty is generally a bit less of a bastard on the
> learning curve than some PHP templating systems, but rest assured,
> if no one has used it before, there will be a learning curve
> before workable templates for the site will be created. If you
> decide on using bitweaver, then if possible, try to migrate any
> preexistent wordpress files over to the bitweaver blog backend.
> It will save you grief having it all bundled into one package. I
> haven't a clue about bitweaver's ability to integrate wordpress
> into a production.

Thanks,

Snip snap caught my attention because it uses groovy and I have done a
good deal of Ruby on Rails stuff.

It seems the java wikis may be a hard sell unless there is a
compelling reason to go that way.
One of our developers has java experience but not PHP, but I think the
push will be for a PHP code based solution. I posted the following in
a java database and php.general:

We are choosing wiki and blog software which may bpth end up being
PHP, but if one was java based and the other PHP I was curious if PHP
and Java can read/write the same type of DBA/DBM style database which
I beleive is an object oriented style database that Perl/PHP use as I
have done some of this in Perl. I expect this might be complex or not
possible, but I am curious. Otherwise two seperate systems based on 2
different languages could not share any code that created objects
rendered by the web server and there could not be a subsytem in one
language that the other interfaced with. The other possibility would
be an XML based solution, but not sure if the complexity on that would
be worth it or an easy sell to others. I had also seen a snip snap
wiki which is groovy based that caught my attention.