Wiki Roundup

For some time now I’ve needed a confidential semi-secure space for a small group to share notes and an occasional file. While there is no shortage of collaborative/groupware type software out there most are overkill for my needs. I don’t want to learn anything new and I certainly don’t want to spend any money.

What I do want is a fairly fine grained permission system and ease of use. These people are writers, not geeks and I’m not about to walk them through Drupal or, for that matter, WordPress. I would also rather stab myself in the eye than install another weblog or CMS.

A wiki seemed to be a good fit so I started poking around for one. My hosting provider’s control panel offers a few installers so that seemed the logical place to start.

First up was everyones favorite, MediaWiki. This puppy, crafted for WikiPedia, is the Swiss army knife of wikidom. It does everything. It is also gigantic, has a bazillion (note: all numbers and facts are actually estimates and assumptions) files and code wise is incomprehensible to anyone without expert level knowledge of PHP.

MediaWiki is a fine piece of software and serves millions well, but for me to set it up for ten people is just absurd.

Then there was DokuWiki. DokuWiki comes very highly recommended by people whose web chops are beyond reproach. It installed effortlessly, was simple to modify and pages rendered 367% (that’d be one of those facts mentioned above) faster than MediWiki.

I thought I had a winner until I broke it. I was fiddling around with the ACL’s and did something foolish. I’m sure it was simple user error, but then again, if I knew what I had done I would have fixed it instead of deleting the database and directory. Having a short attention spanI moved on, but will be revisiting DokuWiki.

The third option was TWiki or, as they put it, “the open source Wiki for the Enterprise”. I should have stopped then. Instead, I wasted a couple of hours perusing docs written in Klingon and learning far more about .htaccess than I ever intended. It was ugly, too.

Then I remembered WikkaWiki.

I installed WikkaWiki a couple of years ago and recalled enjoying it. After confirming that it was still being developed, I downloaded the latest version. Installation was dead simple and the .htaccess — needed to avoid the ridiculous URI’s so common with this stuff — worked out of the box. Changing the appearance of the wiki was just a few lines in a simple and intuitive stylesheet.

It is also easy for users to modify pages, providing they are allowed, just by double clicking the page. This brings up an editing window and the syntax is fairly simple. These people are writing paragraphs, not floating page elements so simple is good.

More importantly, user permissions or ACL’s, just plain worked. Any page can be restricted in a damn near infinite number of ways via simple little check boxes. For example, restricting file uploads is just a matter of limiting access to the page containing the {{files}} action.

I think this will work out just fine.

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