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ONLamp.com: Which Open Source Wiki Works For You?

Posted November 7th, 2004 at 12:17pm

O’Reilly’s ONLamp brings you an article by Shlomi Fish (what a cool name!) introducing several types of wikis: Which Open Source Wiki Works For You?

An old idea–user-writable web pages–has taken off again recently. Wikis are becoming more popular as tools for communication and collaboration. There are also several dozen packages to create them. Shlomi Fish compares features of several popular open source Perl, Python, and PHP Wikis.

Personally, I like TWiki, as it gives me all enough high-end doodads and sprockets for everything I want to throw at it. It is a bit of a pain to set up, though, and the documentation is thorough, but confusing. (It took me nearly an hour to figure out that I had to set the preferences by actually editing the “Preferences” wiki page.) I had PhpWiki there first, but the default installation lacked a number of things (like support for media files) out of the box. MediaWiki (used for the Wikipedia) is way overkill for my needs.

I do want to mention another of my favourites, though: ZWiki. If you have a Zope installation, give ZWiki a whirl. I was able to set it up in two minutes flat, and it uses the built-in security and products of Zope for most of its power and flexibility. I’ve used it for various online courses in the past, and have found it just the right balance of ease-of-use and tweakability.