I currently use Mediawiki on a few different servers:my research group, a class I TA'ed for and it's related classes, and another research website or two. So I'm a big fan of it for certain sites. A wiki allows people to share data and allows people to put together decent looking pages by using the site skins. On the class site, it makes it easy for the other staff to post information and files without digging into any files and provides constant backups.

Other Options (Twiki and Drupal)

A few days ago I decided to look for wiki software capable of WYSIWYG editing. Mediawiki has a few options but nothing that is easy for end users. The one that really stood was TWiki, which had a WYSIWYG editor built-in and has hundreds of plug-ins. It uses a file system for data storage rather than a database (e.g. MySQL) like MediaWiki, which is nice for smaller installations. It also page-by-page permissions built-in, while MediaWiki requires a plug-in. On the other hand, the installation was much less straightforward and the massive number of options and required setup can be overwhelming, even for someone relatively experienced.

This was all great, and I started looking into transitioning our MediaWiki data over to it (there are plug-ins for that too). That's when I realized that TWiki has horrible syntax. And I mean really, really horrible; it is whitespace sensitive.

For example, to make a bulleted list you need " *" (three spaces then an asterisk) and for a sub-bullet you need six spaces and a bullet, etc. In MediaWiki it doesn't care about white space and is just a matter of *, **, *#*#, for bulleted and numbered lists. Then there are headers. Man, I don't even remember what TWiki used, something like "---+" and then more pluses or something. How am I going to explain that to people? And the WYSIWYG editor is only marginally better than the MediaWiki ones, in other words not usable.

Drupal

I switched this website from Mediawiki to Drupal for about a year and then switched to Wordpress because a blog engine just made more sense. Here's what I like about Drupal:

• Many, many more modules for Drupal than Mediawiki.
• A better organized development community; the software gets better faster.
• Modules for integration with Gallery and anything else you could imagine.
• Support for Mediawiki markup (the bright spot on Mediawiki).
• Support for blogs/stream of thought updates.

In the end Drupal was too clunky to maintain for a simple website, although it would be good for more complex content management. Also I found it a bit slow, but that's just me.

This is a tutorial to turn Drupal 5 into a better wiki. It is based heavily upon this page with some modifications to allow tagging. This site used to use MediaWiki which provides an easy way to link between pages and create new pages as well as a far simpler syntax than the default Drupal install.

Installation

You will need to install the following module for Drupal 5.x. As of 3/1/07 be sure to install the dev version of the modules to have all of the latest features.

* path (comes with Drupal)
* diff
* freelinking
* pathauto
* PEAR wiki filter
* recent changes
* wikitools

You'll need to put Text_Wiki/Mediawiki into the Text_Wiki folder appropriately (match the folders) and then drop the whole thing into the PEAR wiki filter folder.

Enable Modules

Enable the following modules in Administer > Site Building > Modules.

* path (comes with Drupal)
* diff
* freelinking
* pathauto
* PEAR wiki filter
* recent changes
* wikitools

Configure Modules

The other instructions create a new "wiki" type, but I'd like to keep the drupal taxonomy and so skipped this step.

Administer > Users > Access Control and give authenticated users the following permissions:

* Access comments
* Post comments without approval
* Access freelinking list
* Access content
* Create story content
* Edit story content
* View revisions

Administer > Site Administration > Freelinking and set the following:

* New content default: Story
* What to do if content not found: Search for content if user can't crete
* Restrict freelinks to this content type: Story

Administer > Site Administration > Input Formats

# Create a new format, "Mediawiki"
# Choose "PEAR wiki filter" from the list of filters. Don't choose anything else.
# Goto the configuration page. Select the following:
#* Path: Enter the path to the PEAR packages per the instructions on the page.
#* Format: Mediawiki
#* Use wiki links: yes
#* Use freelinking: yes

Administer > Site Administration > pathauto.

# Set the separator to the underscore, "_"
# Keep the path settings for all types as "[title]"

Administer > Site Administration > wikitools.

# Select wiki node type to be Story.
# Enable "hijack freelinking"