[Gllug] wikis

[itsbruce at uklinux.net]

On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 10:41:37AM +0100, Huw Lynes wrote:
> On Wed, 08 Oct 2003 11:44:31 +0100
> Jon Dye <jon at pecorous.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone have any recomendations for wiki software?  We want to set 
> > one up at work and we have a linux box that already has apache, php 
> > 4.0.3 and perl 5.005 on it (a bit old I know).
> > 
> we installed PHPWiki here about 12 months ago. People love it. 

What users love is Wikis, not any particular implementation.  All the
wiki implementations share the same basic user interface and concept
(even if some have different mark-up characters).  Jon is asking from a
sysadmin's perspective and he'd benefit from knowing what advantages
different wiki packages offer him as an administrator (and I'm sure many
of the rest of us would be interested).

I've never made any bones about hating PHP (the more I have to use it,
the more I hate it) but phpwiki does have one killer feature: a database
abstraction layer that lets you store all the wiki data in your database
of choice (although this isn't a stable feature because they recently
had to write their own database abstraction layer to avoid using the
bloody awful PearDB).  If any of the Perl wiki implementations make
similar use of the Perl DBI then I'd love to hear about it.

Off on a slight tangent, I'm really get pissed off by people writing
applications that only work with one database backend when there's no
bloody excuse.  Most decent languages have good database abstraction
layers now and most of the open source applications that involve
database backends aren't reliant on specific features only to be found
in one particular database package.  In some cases it's down to laziness
or ignorance but in other's I'm sure it's people playing childish
database wars (e.g. "Postgres is better so you should use it and if you
want to use my application then you'll just have to").  It makes life
much harder for anybody trying to create integrated systems.

-- 
Bruce

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