[Wylug-discuss] Recommendations for a Securable Wiki

[Richard Wade]

> i.   Usemod - no access control worth talking about.
> ii.  MediaWiki - default menus irremovable, without serious hackery
> iii. Zwiki - unbearably slow via plone
> iv.  Name forgotten (Martin Rowe's recommendation - masses of
>     disorganised documentation

I've tried a number of Wikis and have actually ended up adopting a one
written in PHP, which is something I swore I'd never do. This was purely
down to the fact that the majority of PHP applications are badly coded and
have numerous remote exploits.

One of the first I tried was TWiki, which I really liked, and others have
recommended. This is widely used and (from vague memory) is well
supported. My problem with it is that it's written in Perl, which
facilitates bad programming style and therefore makes it more difficult to
extend or alter if you want to.

So I looked at MoinMoin, which I still really like
(http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/). This one is written in Python but does
have really good Access List support from what I recall. It's easy to set
up. It's written in Python, which encourages more structured programming
and code legibility. It's well supported and is under continuous
development. This is my favourite for small Wikis.

However, the one I use for my main Wiki site (http://www.gamerwiki.com, a
collaborative video game encyclopedia), is based on MediaWiki. It's
written in PHP, which I hate with a passion, but is well coded and
reasonably modular. Modifying it is a challenge, but not impossible. The
best thing about it is that it's the Wiki software that powers Wikipedia.
This means that it's under constant development and review. It also means
that if you're producing a Wiki with similar goals to Wikipedia, that all
the hooks and framework are all there. For my specific application,
MediaWiki was definitely the best tool for the job. It also sits on a
MySQL database, which means that it's scalable if your traffic should
increase. Other Wiki can use MySQL at the backend, but most tend to use
some hackery around DBMs or flat files. MySQL means that dumping your data
is easy and it can be injected to other Wiki or databases if required.

So it depends what your application is. If you want something to just
install, get up and running for a small number of users, then something
like TWiki is probably good. If you'd like a cleaner version or something
with good ACL support (I've not verified TWiki's ACL support btw), then
MoinMoin is great. If it's a larger application, then I'd go for something
like MediaWiki.
--
rik