Sat
Dec
29
2007

Wanted: A basic wiki

Wikipedia

My church desperately needs a wiki for staff use. As SWAC has grown, lots of things haven’t kept up.
Information management is among the worse examples.
We have information scattered all over the place. Basic protocols are either not recorded, or set down in non-standard ways and kept in not always logical places. As a new staff member nearly 12 months ago, one of the most frustrating struggles I had was finding out what I should be doing or what was common practice in a given circumstance.

We do have a server in the church office facility, but it is no more than a simple file store – and a very ineffective one at that. It’s running on NT4 Server and limps along on minimal disk space. Worse, there appears to be little or no logic applied to the file structure on the server, so finding documents is very hit and miss. There is no person committed to maintaining the information on the server.

So… I figure that the pastoral and admin staff could really use a wiki to record all sorts of information and protocols so that they could be easily found and easily updated by those using the information in a way that allows tracking of updates.
Apart from helping keep current staff better organised, it would be invaluable for new staff getting up to speed.

Now, if you know me, you will realise that I have an above average commitment to using technology, but I will admit that I do not find most wikis at all intuitive to use. Finding data is usually OK, but the process of adding or modifying entries seems pretty arcane.
Most of the rest of the staff here are significantly less technologically capable, and so any solution needs to be*very* easy to use if it is to actually be useful.

So, gentle reader, I turn to you for assistance. I would love to have suggestions and recommendations for wiki or similar software that might suit out situation. Here’s a list of qualifications:

Essentials

  • Web based (so access is available anywhere)
  • Will run on Unix/Linux and Apache (so I can host it)
  • MySQL database (if it requires one)
  • Easy, easy, easy to use! ;-)
  • Can handle images and other ‘attachments’ to articles
  • Secure. Contents must only be viewable when logged in (if this facility is not available in the software, htaccess login is fine)

Optional

  • Open source

I have one thought: Could Textpattern (the CMS that drives Westserve) be set up to function as a simple wiki?

Thought and suggestions people… Leave a comment below:

Update
On a suggestion, I’ve installed Dokuwiki and it’s looking pretty good. Still have to wrap my mind around some of the concepts and the way they are implemented though. Still open to other suggestions…

Posted by Neil, 29 December 07
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Comment

  1. We’re using the wiki that’s built in to ExpressionEngine. At the moment it’s more for tech people to document things. It could be used by staff.

    As it’s part of ExpressionEngine the membership functions are just part of our main web-site. It handles attachments (e.g. this).

    It has easy to use formatting syntax, and with a plugin you can use textile (or whatever text processor).

    However, it’s probably not worth the cost just to implement the wiki.

    Of course, you can one-click install MediaWiki on your DreamHost account. Although MediaWiki isn’t all that friendly.

    A hosted service called WikiSpaces is popular in teaching circles, because it offers free services for teachers. You might be able to meet your needs with their free basic version.

    I don’t think TextPattern would easily meet your needs, mainly because it doesn’t version articles.

    — Simon · Dec 30, 06:30 AM · #

  2. Yeah, looked at EE’s wiki module – but came to the same conclusion as you re: cost.

    I’ve played around with Mediawiki a few times, but found the learning curve just plain unintuitive.

    At the moment Dokuwiki is looking fairly promising, but I will have to play around a lot more with it to see.
    Thanks for the link to Wikispaces – another hosted solution that looks interesting is Social Text

    Fair point about versioning and TxP.

    — Neil · Dec 30, 08:27 AM · #

  3. What about Google Docs? You could even set it up with Google Apps (something I’ve been considering for TAC).

    — Simon · Dec 31, 09:03 AM · #

  4. Google Docs is OK to a point but is not the answer.

    Google Docs is great for developing content. I am looking to implement it for shared docs for my international professional association. It will be good for something like an issue log. But for documents, it reformats everything into native Google format which does not convert exactly to Microsoft format.

    Google docs allows folders, but since it only uses its own formats it is limited.

    I also investigated Google Groups, but its limitation is that it doesn’t allow folders. I couldn’t work out how to allow others to modify a doc I posted. However, it does have extensive search features.

    Alternatively Neil, how about setting up an Apache server accessing the SWAC G drive as http://swac = G:\. Then install a PHP or HTDIG or similar search engine. Create a webpage http://swac/search.htm which searches the existing G drive. This will allow all staff to find files in the existing mess.

    Grant

    — Grant · Jan 7, 04:15 PM · #

  5. The problem with your last suggestion Grant, is that:

    * The server would struggle to run Apache properly given it’s extreme memory and hard drive constraints.

    * It doesn’t solve the underlying problem: poor information management.

    At the moment, I’m having good success trialling DokuWiki, so I’m hoping to slowly introduce that into the mix…

    — Neil · Jan 8, 01:14 AM · #

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