October 11th, 2004
Harry Fuecks has a good post today about his search for a decent wiki. He ends up favoring DokuWiki, suggesting that the code is pretty code, the features are abundant, and it's generally a good thing.
I recently started using MediaWiki at work and on one of my side projects, but I've been looking for an alternative that DokuWiki might be able to fill. MediaWiki is the software that powers the Wikipedia. One of the main reasons I went with it was its very nice interface. After you install MediaWiki you get something that looks just like Wikipedia, meaning you don't have to screw around customizing a stylesheet or skin into something that passes for user friendly.
But I got a little surprise when introduced MediaWiki to PHP5— the very nice interface is somehow incompatible with 5, so it disables itself and you're bumped back to a more basic skin. I never bothered to research the details of the incompatibility, but I'm sure it will get itself worked out eventually. But a rub is a rub. I'm less interested in putting development time into a wiki than I am in putting content into it.
Another weird thing I found with MediaWiki was that you start off with a lot of stub pages. These show up in non-editable regions of the page, and seem to be geared toward Wikipedia's needs. If the goal of you wiki was to create a mini-Wikipedia, this might come in handy. But I never quite shook the feeling that I was working with the Wikipedia wiki, as opposed to a wiki that happened to be used by that project.
I also considered coWiki, but it's PHP5 only and I alas am not. And although it's not PHP, but rather Ruby (how exotic!), I've also seem recommendations about Instiki. The only downside I see there is the author's possible shortage of time (he's working on other things) for further development.
All of these projects are freely available, but finding something that's solid, actively developed, and flexible enough to bend to your purposes is still a job. Still, this is one area where I think it's better not to build from scratch. It seems like everyone and their brother is hawking wiki software of some sort.