Wiki Advice?

[swestrup]

I'm looking for advice on a Wiki to install on my server for various bits of collaboration. What I need are:

• Support for version control via subversion.
• Able to handle multiple projects
• Easy extensibility (One project will require the ability to create and edit organizational charts).
• Decent Documentation.

Any advice?

Comments

[denizsarikaya.livejournal.com]

Hmm. My experience is limited to WikiWikiWeb back in 2000, TWiki (which had problems with apache 2 last time I checked in late 2003, so wasn't good if you wanted to put subversion on your box), and GracefulTavi, which is the in-house wiki NITI uses.

I don't know if any support subversion, though I know for sure TWiki didn't in late 2003. I don't remember far back enough to know about WikiWikiWeb's ability to handle multiple projects nor its extensibility. I can tell you, though, that on both those points (and the last one), GracefulTavi is pretty good.

Soo... there's a comment drawing solely on personal experience.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

TWiki is pretty good, I'm told, as it has a pretty simple core design and just has the right hooks in the right place to have plugins to do what you want (I think storage is a plugin and I'm almost certain there's a Subversion plugin for it).

I like WikiWikiWeb, because I like it's incredible simplicity (and that's hardly ever wrong, in my book!).

GracefulTavi reeks. It sucks. I didn't see any support for multiple projects (although my mind can't really wrap around what he means by that, for it is quite against WikiNature), and it's got an horrible extensibility feature that very stupidly done (your favorite minion did it, and we all know he's übersmart, don't we?). It's also slow as hell with almost no users on a massively over-powered system.

I don't know how responsible we are for the suckiness of GracefulTavi versus the original WikkiTikkiTavi, but I have a very bad taste in my mouth from the whole thing.

[swestrup]

Thanks for the input. As for the 'multiple projects', I am now hosting 3 or 4 websites on my server, and more than one of them will want a Wiki. Also, at least one of the sites will have wikis that will have completely disjoint sets of users: some will be public, some won't.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

I think they probably all support that. In any case, nothing that a few hardlinks couldn't fix. ;-)

[skjalm.livejournal.com]

The only experience I've ever had with Wikis were the one someone back at Uni had set up - most likely it wasn't set up too brilliantly. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name... and they've finally disabled access from the outside so even though I remember the URL I can't go look it up. Bastards!

Can it have been called something like Wiki Tiki Tavi?

But it really struck me as being very cumbersome and the way we used it there was no version control of any kind. In addition to this it annoyed me immensely that there was no built in user handling - anyone could edit it. It is, as we all know, possible to fix that through various authentication modules for Apache or whatever webserver you run. But I really missed being able to see who had made changes to what.

At some point we used the WebDAV module for Apache. But seriously... use regular RCS, CVS or the-new-versioning-system-people-talk-about instead. WebDAV did work, yes, but it was hardly more than a substitution for FTP'ing .

Not too helpful, I know. But that'll never stop me from ranting about something ;-)

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

As denizsarikaya points out, we use GracefulTavi at work. It stores all its information in MySql (and nothing else at the moment) so it would be totally infeasible to get it to use subversion. If you can live with that, I find it's otherwise a fine Wiki that's quite easy to modify.

I don't think there's all that many Wikis out there that use Subversion, since it's a bit too new to find in a mature Wiki. If GracefulTavi doesn't work out, you could try to find one that uses CVS and then port it to Subversion (ugh). The canonical list of all wikis available is at Ward Cunningham's original Wiki