I was looking for some Wiki software the other day that I could use to handle a large volume of static content I had with my old CMS that doesn’t really fit into WordPress very well. I settled on the excellent DokuWiki.
Unlike most Wiki software, DokuWiki doesn’t use a database but instead stores all data in plain ASCII files. Not sure how well that would work for very active Wiki’s, but as I’m using it as a read-only application anyway (i.e., I’m the only user allowed to make edits), its a nice, clean way for me to set up my content. And it was trivially easy to install.
What all are you importing into the wiki?
Well, I had a bunch of public domain e-books in my conversant site, so I’ve added those. For example, lots of books about pirates I grabbed off of Project Gutenberg (need to go through and give them proper Wiki formatting at some point, though).
I’ve also had a longstanding desire to do a B:TVS fansite which I’ve got a shell for.
The drawback is unlike Conversant, now I’ve got three separate applications to do what I could do with just one — and, of course, searching across them because somewhat tricky. There is a plugin that integrates DokuWiki into WordPress so it at least uses the same template, etc., but it doesn’t appear to be compatible with the latest version of WP.
It’s really a tough tradeoff. WordPress has an active development community but a lot of the stuff we used to do in Conversant is kinda hacked together from plugins and hope.
(Also: I posted this at Animalrights.net – can you contact me? I seem to have a lot more permissions than I think I should have.)
“It’s really a tough tradeoff. WordPress has an active development community but a lot of the stuff we used to do in Conversant is kinda hacked together from plugins and hope.”
That is a huge drawback. This site is currently using 25 plugins.
One of the frustrating things is there is a lot that should, imo, be built in that you have to go out and get a third party plugin for. Want to cache pages for better performance? Get a plugin. Want to include a custom footer in your RSS feed? Get a plugin. Add redirections if you move content? Get a plugin.