Donald Z. Osborn wrote: > I've asked this before without getting any echo, but since there are some > folks who have apparently switched to PmWiki from other wiki software, I'm > interested to hear what their rationale was and what they feel about their
I'm still in the evaluation process, but you might be interested what I found so far. Using PhpWiki for my personal "PIM", I want to switch to a better maintained and "better to understand" wiki. I'm evaluating the wiki engines also for a new project. Maybe you want to have a look at the two threads "Selecting a Wiki engine" I started 2006-10-02 in this list and 2006-10-04 in the DokuWiki list. Please note that the contributions are biased, most posters weren't aware of the current development of the "other" wiki. > I ask because there are people with whom I am in contact who have made > intimations about the quality of MediaWiki. On the latter I like it a lot I stopped looking at it long ago, but heared that the code quality improves. But it's still the Wikipedia engine, made primarily for this purpose and not for you <g>. You should also check whether it is still impossible to purge old revisions. > (per use in Wikipedia) and don't disagree, but I also like PmWiki a lot due > to its adaptability among other things. Frankly PmWiki was easier to set up Pros: good documentation, community is very active and helpful, clean separation of PmWiki files and user config/data (=> easy update, easy backup), customization is very easy and possible for pages, groups or the whole site. _Many_ powerful features like page text variables, page lists, trails... Configuration in wiki pages makes administration easy. Very small core. Seems to be designed carefully for robustness more than "neat" extensions. Cons: Internationalization problems. For example, 8 bit pagenames result in 8 bit filenames. You have to be careful which names to allow, which tools to use for backup/restore and when migrating to another OS. The search result display (rating, context) is not yet as good as in other wikis but shall be improved in the near future according to http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/RoadMap DokuWiki: Pros: Full UTF-8 support. Very simple to setup. Better search result display (but less powerful search options). Side-by-side revision diffs show changed words (but only in markup, while PmWiki shows also rendered diffs). Web based user and ACL management in the core, including self-registration by mail. Neat "media manager". Automatic saving of "draft" versions during edit. "Breadcrumbs" show navigation history. Cons: Metadata stored apart from page text. Separation of core, customization and data not as clear as in PmWiki. Distribution doesn't contain full documentation (links to website). Oprhans/wanted only as plugin, maybe broken for current version. Other differences: PmWiki merges concurrent changes, DokuWiki locks pages. Both methods have pros and cons: non-techies could have problems to understand PmWiki's merging, and DokuWiki visitors pressing "edit" only to see the source lock the page for real editors. DokuWiki uses more "modern" techniques ("Ajax") to look neat, for example to display the title search results "as you type" or a reminder when your page lock expires (considered annoying by some users). But if you only disallow your browser to change graphics by js, you don't even get a correct button bar for editing in DokuWiki. DokuWiki caches HTML output of pages. This speeds up display, but the initial rendering is much slower than in PmWiki. You should avoid large (100KiB) pages in both wikis. DokuWiki mangles pagenames at a selectable level. At least, they are converted to lower case. This avoids portability problems. You can also convert Umlauts (to ae oe ue) or even romanize the page name. Else it's in UTF-8. The advantage is safety/portability, the disadvantage is the poor display in page lists. Documentation internationalization: The DokuWiki distribution is already rather complete localized regarding the user interface, but not the documentation - it doesn't even contain a German syntax reference. Well, you can grab the source from the web site and use it. PmWiki tries to provide a complete documentation in any language as additional download. Although this is a neat approach, it's a maintenance problem - the internationalized documentation likely will be behind the English version. The question is where to cut between "mandatory" and "optional" localized content. The PmWiki core is maintained only by Pm, while DokuWiki has four "core developers". DokuWiki uses "darcs" revision control system, PmWiki uses Subversion. Other wikis: There are hosting configurations (Sourceforge) where you can't use "plain text" page storage because the web server has no write access. Look for wikis using a *sql database. If you consider using PhpWiki: it has many features, for example supports several page storage methods, can search for regular expressions etc. Using it since years, I like many of it's properties, e.g. the page storage as MIME messages (complete and easy to read/modify). But the community disappears and it lacks maintenance. http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki-1.2/ says "The current 1.3.x phpwiki on sf.net is currently down, due to yet unknown circumstances" since 1/2 year! HTH, Oliver -- Oliver Betz, Muenchen _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
