[vox-tech] tikiwiki

[Stuart Turner]

Larry Ozeran wrote:
>> Anyone with insights in how you chose (actually not theoretically) 
>> one Wiki over another would be much appreciated, particularly if you 
>> wish you had done something differently for some reason. Thanks. 
We have used or dabbled with various wiki's including TikiWiki and the 
Wikimedia engine (and others). Wikimedia excelled regarding the ease of 
deployment (LAMPP stack), simplicity of the wiki markup and overall 
familiarity with those who have read or edited content on Wikipedia. 
However, most of the wiki's we used were limited in several key features 
important to our projects:

1) Permissions
We require the ability to have secure areas for both viewing and 
editing, including assigning users and roles (groups) to pages or page 
content areas (e.g. "spaces")
2) A robust search engine
3) Ability to export content to MSWord or PDF (most of our partners work 
deeply within a Microsoft Office culture)
4) Efficient and reliable backup and recovery mechanisms
5) Good WYSIWYG editing

Although not open source nor free (we qualify for educational 
discounts), we have settled on Atlassian software's Confluence (wiki) 
and JIRA (issue tracking, project management) suite. JIRA's project or 
issue tracking summaries may be embedded automatically (mostly using 
RSS) within the wiki content in the Confluence product. One negative of 
Confluence is that it does not provide an automatic "Table of Contents" 
as does Wikimedia if you format your content using headings, although 
there is a plug-in.

Aside from the specific application or product, in general, the use of 
Wiki's has been overall infectious and the most successful collaborative 
component of our various projects.

Links:
Atlassian:
http://www.atlassian.com/

Confluence Wiki:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/

~ Stuart