About our selection process
The comments below are a blend of our experiences and of facts and opinions culled from various websites. Please do not take our rejection of a particular wiki as an indication that you should not try it or that it is in any way deficient. We had a very limited test environment, and anything that did not fit the limitations was rejected out of hand. That environment was:
- Windows 2000 Server
- Apache 2 for Windows
- PHP 4 scripting support
- Perl scripting support
- no back-end database
Some of the many wiki engines we tried or examined (in alpha order)
- DokuWiki http://www.splitbrain.org/dokuwiki/ -- This is a beautiful looking wiki, but at the time we were evaluating wikis it appeared to be undergoing a major change, and was considered too unstable for our purposes. Worth a second look.
- Instiki http://instiki.org/show/HomePage -- Very easy to install, beautiful clean interface, but can't do file uploads. Also difficult to figure out how to change the port on the built in WEBrick web server. Couldn't figure out a way to run it under Apache, and it might be impossible given that it needs the Ruby interpreter and may be tightly tied to the embedded WEBrick server. -- This was the first wiki we tried, and it was painless to set up and wonderful to look at, but the lack of file upload support made it a non-starter.
- MediaWiki -- Used by the Wikipedia project, which is one of the most popular wikis. This is a very large software suite and was far too complex for the simple trials we wanted to perform. To install MediaWiki you need four components:
- MySQL - an SQL database to store the Wiki text, user list etc. (another reason for rejection)
- Apache - a web server to serve the HTML web pages
- PHP - the programming language that MediaWiki is written in
- MediaWiki itself, which is a suite of programs written in PHP
- MoinMoin http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/ -- A Python Language wiki engine, features flexibility and modular design. Can use built in Python http server. -- We rejected it because of the lack of Python scripting support in our environment.
- OddMuseWiki http://www.oddmuse.org/cgi-bin/wiki -- Really popular descendant of UseModWiki. One script, easy to install. Perl http://www.perl.com/download.csp , always available. (Download Win32 Binaries from ActiveState http://www.activestate.com/) Page database is a bunch of files, neither a database nor a versioning system is required. We ran this wiki for a week, but rejected it because the markup can be very confusing to new users (not good!!)
- PhpWiki http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/HomePage -- A very popular PHP Language Wiki based on UseModWiki, with many features added. Looks reasonable, can use flat files or DB, may have admin issues. This candidate was not tested due to lack of time.
- PmWiki http://www.pmwiki.org/ -- (What we eventually chose.) A popular PHP Language Wiki, easy installation, simple design, nice feature list. One of the nicest features of PmWiki is its low system requirements. PmWiki requires a web server that is capable of running PHP 4.1 or later. Uses flat files. PmWiki does not require:
- a SQL or other database
- CGI access or the ability to run CGI scripts (this can be a big advantage)
- TikiWiki http://tikiwiki.sourceforge.net/ -- A has-everything content management system with a powerful Wiki. -- There seem to be lots of complaints about instability. Tiki relies on three major external applications to run:
- PHP (scripting language)
- Apache (web server)
- MySQL (database) -- we rejected it for this reason and because of the stability concerns expressed by others
- TwikiClone http://twiki.org/ -- A powerful, complicated Perl Language wiki, aimed at large corporate intranets. -- This looks like the 600 pound gorilla of Perl Wikis. It is difficult to install under Windows as shown here: http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/WindowsInstallCookbook because it is trying to fake looking like UNIX and it really wants Apache. Rejected for the obvious reasons!
- UseModWiki -- A Perl Language wiki, based on Ward's original WikiWiki. -- Not tested because it it really just a variant of OddMuseWiki, which we had already rejected.