One of my charges at work is to build out web enabled collaboration tools so I’ve spent time configuring and rolling out solutions for our users in three different geographies (UK, Singapore, India). This is not particularly challenging of itself because we had nothing before so “anything” is better; but its prompted some questions on 900 pound gorillas out there that I’ll pose rhetorically here:
Twiki – I don’t like or hate Twiki itself; what I don’t like is how it takes a pound of flesh to configure it for regular use. It seems to be particularly daunting to upgrade from an earlier release IF you install from tarball or zip archive. I’d stress to the Twiki folks to get something standard to do upgrades. How about specific steps?
PMwiki – I happen to like PMwiki quite a bit. Here is an install method. Download tarball, unarchive in the webroot or under. Make a config.php file, perhaps write a small php file to alias things correctly. Change some basic permissions. Done.
Mediawiki – I really like Mediawiki; but it has this big feel to it; like it has so many moving parts that its hard to track. I know its easier than that but I’ve never rolled it out for use.
Moinmoin – I don’t like this one. It seems difficult to get right and easy to get wrong. I prefer the low bandwidth in energy ones so I focus on PMwiki. Why is it so difficult to install I wonder? But yet; I’ve used it when a Python God set it up before and I found it decent.
I think its really a combination of use and administration. Most of these for users are just fine. Users just use; but administrators have to do the ugly parts.
Personal and Private Wiki Spaces
There are simple ways to do this. You can do this quite easily on Linux or get a VMWare appliance which provides one or more of the wiki’s by using VMWare’s appliance site. Check it out!
Or you can do it yourself on Windows or Linux. On Windows, you can use something like XAMPP which makes it pretty easy to run a personal and private webserver even on USB media. If you want something else, check out wikidpad which offers a personal wiki space. There are lots of options for a personal webserver and a wiki makes a great tool for recording, journaling, logging, remembering facts.
On Ubuntu, you can do this at a personal level by installing Apache2 and restricting it to only answer requests from localhost. This is pretty easy and you can find the answers. Then just grab PMwiki (ideal) or spend some time with TWiki (still workable) and make it yours. You can also install twiki from the debian packages. I just don’t like doing it that way because it deposits detritus all over the place and I’d rather control those kinds of packages myself.
In the end there is no recommended wiki or why, folks. But I believe a wiki answers basic questions about how we utilize, find, and stage information for our busy lives. A personal webserver is easy these days whether on Windows or Linux or whatever. If you want ease of use, choose PMwiki. If you have an existing wiki at work, you may want to mirror that one. Its easier to mirror the date that way.
