>Thanks for your feedback. I would be glad to know a bit more about what you
>were looking for, which wikis you tried and what made you choose XWiki
>rather than another system. This would help us understand better what makes
>XWiki stand out and what it lacks compared with other platforms.
>If you've got a little time, do you think you could tell us a bit about
>that?
>Many thanks in advance,
>Guillaume
Ok, here's a small list of reasons why I chose Xwiki and not some other
wiki.
Before I begun searching for suitable wiki, I gathered a list of
requirements that a wiki must have.
Wikis that I tested or studied were: MediaWiki, TikiWiki, Xwiki and
Confluence. Maybe some others too, but I don't remember ;)
Here is that list and how different wikis fulfill those requirements:
Requirement 1: Ability to transclude pages and sections of pages in other
pages
MediaWiki: Yes, support page transcluding natively and section transcluding
can be added with plugin
Xwiki: Supports page transcluding. Section macro was easy to do, and I got
to do it just the way I like it :)
Confluence: I think it supports transcluding. Not tested it though.
Requirement 2: Support for hierarchical information ( tree-like )
MediaWiki: Very bad. Can be achieved using categories, but because Category
is a namespace, category names must be unique which was unacceptable in
mycase.
Xwiki: Very flexible. Namespaces ( Spaces in Xwiki ) are easy to create and
pages can be ordered hierarchically using page's parent -field.
Requirement 3: Support for content localization/translation
Mediawiki: None. AFAIK every language needs it's own Wiki.
Xwiki: Built-in. Creating translated content is easy. Functions to retrieve
translations still needs work, but are good enough to get the job done.
Requirement 4: Flexible, easy to maintain user rights
Mediawiki: User right management very restricted. Better with plugins but
still poor.
Xwiki: Superb! Very easy, yet powerful way to handle user rights. I really
liked that user right has 3 options: allow, deny, neutral. This combined
with user groups and spaces makes user rights management very enjoyable.
TikiWiki: Frustratingly detailed. Has some very powerful features, but list
of about 100 different user right parameters is very frustrating. (This
opinion is based on very quick tests)
Requirement 5: Ability make offline HTML dumps of wiki content
MediaWiki: Possible (maybe with a plug-in, I don't remember)
Xwiki: Supported natively. Yet, I decided to make my own XML Dump program
which fetches content through XML/RPC interface.
And now a list of pros and cons for every wiki I tested:
Mediawiki:
+ Widely used, lots of help available
+ lots of plugins
- hierarchical information support very bad
- user right management limited and hard to comprehend
TikiWiki:
+ Lots of features
- User interface looks clumsy and is difficult to use ( maybe because I
tested Xwiki just before this ;)
- User rights management is overwhelming
Confluence: ( not tested, opinions based on what I read about it)
+ seems finalized
+ used widely in enterprises and universities
+ XML/RPC interface
- PRICE
Xwiki:
+ Very slick UI
+ Macros / Programming capabilities
+ XML/RPC interface
+ User rights management
+ customer support
- Seems in many ways incomplete/work in progress
- Documention is scattered across the internets / help is very hard to find
using Google. Most searches end up in Xwiki JIRA-pages.
- Xwiki documentation pages seem disorientating. Even if I know theres some
useful info there, it takes me 15mins to find it. (DevGuide, dev.xwiki.org,
xwiki.org/Features)
- Example:
http://xoffice.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/CodeBase/XmlRpcProxy and
http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Features/XMLRPC, so similar, yet in
totally different places
- Scandinavian characters in pageIds don't seem to work
I hope these lists are helpful to you. Despite some criticism I presented
here, you have developed an amazing wiki. I think you should focus a little
more on making documentation easy to find and read even for someone who is
just starting to code or otherwise noob (such as me ;). Now it gives an
impression that you have to be Linux-expert/super-coder/uber-nerd to be able
to set up wiki and program it (which you don't need to be, it's actually
quite simple).
Best regards,
Ari
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