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Re: Wiki software.



Quoting Peter Easthope (2020-01-23 17:22:49)
> A friend asked about setting up a wiki for development of a relatively 
> simple document.  Mostly text.  Possibly a few illustrations.  Running 
> on a personal machine or a hosting service; not determined yet. 
> Authenticated access to a large group of people; not public.
> 
> MediaWiki is an obvious possibility.  Too complex?  MoinMoin as used
> for wiki.debian.org isn't so visually appealing; just a configuration
> choice?  Many others.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software


There are lots of options.  Right one depends on many factors.

Rich expressivity of character placement - e.g. ability to express 
mathematical equations or specific kerning (i.e. character spacing)?

Rich expressivity of content layout - e.g. placement or coloring or size 
of all or specific headlines or footers?

Conformity of content layout - e.g. that 4 classes of document each 
follow a unique layout, and only two of them may contain custom 
deviations?

Reuse of content - e.g. maintaining a footer common across all pages, 
adding a sidebar to all blog entries, another sidebar to the bio page, 
and no sidebar on frontpage?

Administration - I agree with Dan that if your friend should not only 
edit content but also _maintain_ the service, then you want something 
not only easy to _use_, and a simple rule of thumb is then to steer 
clear of solutions requiring a database backend.

Security - if the service is public accessible and your friend is not a 
skilled admin, then (unlike Dan) I consider Docuwiki a bad choice 
because it executes code based on what each visitor requests, and the 
code executed is PHP which has a bad track record of security flaws.  
Maybe when only a closed group gets access it is ok, but I would still 
be worried...

I recommend to first consider solutions that generates a static website 
each time content is edited.  One of the first to do that was Ikiwiki.  
It is old and its default style is boring, and its user editing 
interface can feel clunky - but style can be easily changed to something 
more fancy (my partner and I made e.g. http://bsg.biks.dk/ ), and most 
other static web compilers lack the web-based editing interface included 
with Ikiwiki which I find important for projects where some of the 
content editors are not comfortable using a console-based interface.

If you want to edit locally but push to a cloud service, you can do that 
with Ikiwiki and https://www.branchable.com/ or and popular alternatives 
like hugo, jekyll, and nanoc.

For more technical "groupware" things mabe consider fossil or redmine.

Personally I've used MoinMoin in the past (and introduced it to Debian 
many many years ago) but nowadays _only_ use static web compilers - 
mostly¹ Ikiwiki.  If I could live without the web-based editing 
interface then I would first consider hakyll (for its powerful content 
parser based on Pandoc), and then hugo (for being extremely fast).


 - Jonas

¹ Where I don't use Ikiwiki I instead use a Makefile and pandoc, or 
mkdocs.

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private

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