• WikiReview

My introduction to Wikis was the SeattleWireless MoinMoin wiki and since then I've spent quite a bit of time researching, playing with and talking about WikiSoftware. Since my involvement with PersonalTelco was quite public I get asked fairly often which wiki I think is the best. Sadly there is no short answer, so here I will try and keep the longer answer updated. -- AdamShand

See also: EvaluatingSoftware, WikiSoftware, BlogSoftware, DreamWiki, WhatIsImportantAboutWiki

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Current Favorite

DokuWiki

I've recently discovered DokuWiki and have been amazed at the overall quality of it. It is incredibly easy to install, has many beautifully developed plugs, good permissions, support for arbitrarily deep page hierarchies and a couple of quite beautiful themes. It is developed in the PhpLangauge and is easy to hack on, even by relatively inexperienced programmers.

It is missing a couple features (eg. per-namespace header/footers) but overall is a good fit for most uses I can think of. It has replaced MoinMoin (which powers this site) as my favorite wiki.

The Best For Intranet Use

TWiki

TWiki has long reigned as the intranet champion. Originally written by PeterThoeny, Twiki is a PerlLanguage wiki with a vast user base and a staggering collection of plugins and features. It has a very mature code base, a slow release cycle and tends to be very stable and predictable, which is appropriate given its target audience (corporations). Sadly TWiki is quite difficult to install and configure and its code base is difficult to work with. Fortunately there is a patch or a plugin already written for almost anything you would want to do.

While TWiki is a wonderful option, personally I can't get over how *ugly* it (and it's syntax) is. The next intranet wiki I deploy will probably use PmWiki instead. The way that PmWiki uses groups instead of TWiki's webs is particularly appealing.

The Best For Blogging

DokuWiki is what I am using to power my blog.¹ It has fabulous support for comments, RSS/Atom feeds for recent changes, blog posts and comments and tagging (with tag clouds)

I almost went with PmWiki which has more hacks and tweaks available but after messing with it for a couple of weeks I was blown away by the elegance of DokuWki.

OddMuse and IkiWiki also look like viable choices. IkiWiki was particularly appealing to me with it's native support for MarkDown and blogging and using Subversion as it's backend, but I was lured by Doku.

The Easiest to Install

DokuWiki. Unzip and point your browser at it's install.php file. Rock.

Hosted Wikis

• If you don't have the know-how or resources to host your own wiki, consider going with an online wiki service such as: JotSpot, Cospire, Confluence. Some of the plans are totally free and there is no advertising.

Links

• http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki

• http://ikiwiki.kitenet.net/

• http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/

• http://twiki.org/

• http://www.pmwiki.org/

• http://www.kwiki.org/

• http://www.oddmuse.org/

• http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/

• http://cospire.com/

• http://jot.com/

Comments

Re. MoinMoin, "missing some critical features for corporate intranet usage" -- such as ... ?

• I actually don't remember what I was specifically thinking of anymore (oops!). The way TWiki handles webs is very useful for deparments, it's ability to rename pages (and all the backlinks) is important and it's array of plugins can be quite handy. I've removed the "critical" since I can no longer remember details. -- Adam.
  • Nothing like following up your own bad memory months later but anyway. An example of a feature Moin is missing in comparison to TWiki is the ability to rename a page from within the GUI and have all of the links which pointed at the page get updated automatically. Other examples are the ability to do define fine grained permissions, integrate against alternate authentication sources and to have multiple Wiki's all existing under the same structure and being able to search/move/rename pages between them. For the record I know that many of these things are currently being worked on, I'm in total awe of the amount of cool things that the Moin team is getting done at the moment. My only point is that it is polish on the outside UI which often gets things accepted into the corporation, I'm hopefully I'll be able to replace TWiki with Moin for our intranet in the near future! -- Adam.

  Oooh, another example of functionality we use on our TWiki constantly is the spreadsheet plugin which allows you to use tables for basic spreadsheet functionality.

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