I am setting up a Wiki for our office to use as a knowledge base. I did a search and looked at a few sites that compare them feature wise, but after having set up a couple and using them briefly I am left wanting. I was wondering if anyone had any personal experience with something they’d feel comfortable recommending.
What I need is something pretty basic.
I really don’t care too much about how modern it looks. I want some basic formatting of pages, preferably an easy wysiwyg setup for the office drones, easy attachment of files so we can use it to store docs and software installers, and some kind of basic permissions so we can grant access at a group level. History would be nice, and it should have some kind of search function. Basic tagging would work fine for our needs. It doesn’t have to have full text search or searching of attachments.
What I selected and have started working with is Docuwiki. For the most part it’s fine, but the way you create pages is a little odd, linking is not so simple, and attachments are a pain. It’s not something I think that anyone in the office could use easily with no training. If we stick with this, I imagine I’m going to have to do much of the work, and that kind of defeats the purpose.
So does anyone have something the like that works well for random users. All of our peeps can use email with no problem so I feel like something that feels like a webmail client would work well, but I haven’t found anything better than docuwiki so far.
Oh, I’d also like to stick with something done in PHP, Perl, CGI, or anything that can drop into a LAMP server easily. I don’t like the idea of running anything java based or esoteric with specialized requirements.
[quote=272430:@Norman Palardy]MediaWiki handles a lot of the things you’re looking for but there’s no WYSIWYG editor
That’s about the biggest complaint I have about it[/quote]
I’ve been using TikiWiki at my work as a knowledgebase. It works well. I first created a VM and installed XAMPP on it. I then requested that it install the pre-built TikiWiki module that was designed for the XAMPP stack.
I added a plugin for code as I put in lots of code snippets inside of it.
The one aspect that I wish it had better implemented was a breadcrumbs path that would let me go back to previous pages, or to see the page hierarchy. Other than that, it works well and is visually appealing.
Just a quick follow up. I ended up installing both Tiki and Foswiki after my brief foray with Docuwiki. Tiki was a little easier to install, but I never could get page attachments working. They have two methods of doing page attachments and neither would work for me. The File Gallery feature worked fine and I could upload to that, but it’s not quite what we needed. While it seems to be a bit hodgepodge in the way it’s put together, I think it was pretty close to being really good. It might work well for someone else on a different server setup.
Foswiki is a little more complicated install wise, but there are good instructions available and once it was installed and setup it worked without incident. The page attachments worked right away and it’s a straightforward and simple feature that just works.
Both of these wikis are using a somewhat responsive design and basic functionality seems to work well enough for looking things up on a phone when needed.
Both of these tools are full of features and I think that’s part of the problem with them as well. I looked for something simpler but functional and didn’t find anything. I think once I turn off a bunch of stuff and simplify the main template that Foswiki will work quite well for us.
Hopefully this will help someone else in the future. You can waste way too many hours selecting a piece of software like this.
I ended up installing MediaWiki after seeing the VisualEditor in action. It’s very slick and looks super easy for updating pages. However it requires installing another service which uses NodeJS called Parsoid. This converts the wiki markup to the visual editor text and back again. It’s seemless when you get it set up, but can be a pain to install with all the interdependencies.
After playing with that for a bit and comparing things to Foswiki I ran across a very nice Bootstrap theme option for Dokuwiki. I liked the look of it so much compared to Foswiki that I ended up installing it as well. It was very easy to set up since most things with Dokuwiki install through the browser using the admin interface. It also happened that an update for Dokuwiki was released and I was able to do that through the browser as well. Very simple. Much better experience than the other two systems.
So finally after all that hemming and hawing I have actually deployed my initial choice, Dokuwiki, with the added Bootstrap3 theme.
I think after all is said and done the Wysiwyg editing is really nice, but not a necessity. Linking is actually straightforward except for the non-existent page linking. That’s a little odd at first, but also not bad once you do it a few times. Page attachments are also working fine. I am setting up a snippet plugin to make inserting some standard widgets onto pages a little more straightforward for users, but I think this is going to end up being a well used tool for us. We’ve already had some user edits and it’s only the first day.