Re: Wiki's

["Ruth A. Kramer" <rhkramer@fast.net>]

Andrew Miehs wrote:
> The two that come to mind are jspWiki, and Twiki.
> 
> Has anyone had BAD experiences with either of these two? or should I be using
> something completely different... (Am NOT a PHP fan.)

No.  ;-)  I use TWiki for WikiLearn
(http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Wikilearn).  I evaluated wikis about 3
years ago and decided TWiki was closest to meeting all my needs.  It
was, and AFAICT, it still is.  An advantage of TWiki is that it has an
active community of developers instead of the typical lone developer
(for wikis).  

There are some disappointments, but they are gradually being addressed,
and one day I'd expect all will be well.  The one wiki I did not
evaluate very carefully three years ago was the mediawiki, and if I had
to pick again, I would evaluate it.

Things that drew me to TWiki included:

   * permanent storage of all revisions (except when temp storage on
SourceForge (or wherever your hosting is done) runs out -- in that case,
revisions that occur during the problem are rolled into a single
revision)

   * diff capability (although I'd prefer "Word style" diffs)

   * per page access control (read, write)

   * email notification of changes (unfortunately, on a web rather than
an individual page basis)

BTW, TWiki allows dividing a wiki into multiple "webs" (think
directories or sub-wikis).

Recently TWiki got a face lift with a new skin (but you can revert to
the classic look or choose from a multitude of other skins).

Storage of content is in "plain text" files (well, plain text plus TWiki
markup) which means, among other things, that you can consider using
other search engines if you don't like TWikis.  (On the WikiLearn site,
I provide access to Google or the TWiki search engines.)

When I investigated wikis, I created pages on the C2 wiki, titled
something like WikiEngineReview.  They were never finished or totally
organized, in fact they look pretty ugly at this point, but they may
give you some help, and if you're ambitious (even a little), you might
correct any errors or omissions you notice.

regards,
Randy Kramer