Question: What's the best Wiki framework to build a simple looking site for the general public and a full fledged Wiki system for power users?

Tue 7 Sep 2010 - 6:26 pm UTC

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Question: What's the best Wiki framework to build a simple looking site for the general public and a full fledged Wiki system for power users?

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Asked by subpic on Tue 19 Jan 2010 - 6:20 am UTC:

I'd like to allow some users to change a site easily. The structure of the
site is not too complex (see http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~face/ ). So I was
thinking of using an existing Wiki framework (or something similar) to do
just that. 

Requirements:
- pages should be editable by power users, but normally view-only by
general public
- when a page is viewed by an anonymous user (general public) it shouldn't
show any wiki controls at all
- in some sections of the site, only parts of a page which correspond to a
specific user should be editable by that user (see the "people" section).

I was considering foswiki (or maybe twiki), but if you have better ideas on
how to do this easier I'm all ears. The site will be deployed on Linux. I
prefer foswiki because of it's system requirements (no database needed,
revision system etc).

Cancelled by subpic on Thu 21 Jan 2010 - 4:19 am UTC:

Nobody was interested.

Thanks

Uclue Researcher Comment by Researcher Roger Browne (eiffel) on Thu 21 Jan 2010 - 10:38 am UTC:

Hi subpic,

Lots of us were interested, but it's hard to see the way forward within the
scope of a $10 question.

Whenever someone asks for "the best" of something, that implies an
exhaustive search. I expect it would take a few hours of research just to
assemble an exhaustive list of candidate wikis.

Then, you have one very specific requirement (your last one) which probably
isn't clearly specified in the feature lists of most wiki software.
Therefore it would be necessary to delve into the detailed documentation to
answer this. And some wiki software has outdated documentation, so it would
really be necessary to look further, perhaps by searching support forums,
or even by installing the software. It's just too big a question to
research.

But in my opinion the answer is easy. Stick with a big mainstream wiki such
as MediaWiki. It's well-supported, well-documented and likely to be around
for the long term. Sure it may not be a perfect match to your stated
requirements, but a 99% match on a mainstream product is probably better
than a 99.5% match on a niche product.

I have used many different wikis (including twiki) in the past, but twiki
wouldn't be my choice nowadays. Also, I used to go out of my way to avoid
the perceived hassles of setting up a database to support a wiki, but once
I "bit the bullet" and did so there was no going back - the power and
flexibility was worth it.

If you are prepared to do a fair amount of setup and some customization, a
solution based on a CMS such as Drupal would be well-suited to this kind of
website. If you want to keep it simple, you may be better off to stick to a
mainstream wiki such as MediaWiki and if necessary adapt your needs to the
way it works.

Of course MediaWiki is open source so you can customize it to your heart's
content, but then you would need to merge those modifications back in every
time you install a version upgrade of MediaWiki.

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