Best/easiest way to set up a wiki?

Drez

Okay I have a website that I'd like to kludge a quick-and-dirty Wiki onto. The purpose of the Wiki is for people to post profiles and put their current games and multiplayer IDs, and also (if possible) to have all this data automatically collate on some other page, or at least automatically index new/all user pages into some table of contents-type thing.

Couple of things:

a) I know diddly-squat about hosting or designing a wiki.

b) I'd need some free software. I don't want to pay for a software package here.

c) My web host has automatic installers for phpWiki and WikiTiki. I just installed phpWiki and it seems pretty ugly.

Any suggestions? How much time investiture am I looking at for setting this up. I basically just want people to be able to make profiles. I'm assuming (read: hoping) that's not a very complicated task (to set up)?

bowen

I prefer mediawiki. It's the standard wiki most people use today.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

Drez

Thanks, I'll look into that.

GothicLargo

If you want something a little more polished then Mediawiki, there's also Confluence.

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

Confluence is cheap but not free unless you're an official non-profit or an open source project. However, it's from the people who make Jira (which is a very good product as well), and it does everything Mediawiki does and then some.

Basically, Mediawiki behind the scenes is not, well, done. It's done enough to work for wikipedia (it needs to be lightweight, fast, and easily scalable) but features wise mediawiki tends to make you do whatever you want to do in the most awkward way possible. Adding pictures? Awkward. Adding tables? Awkward. WYSIWYG? You can do it yourself but you'll lose custom wikimarkup and formatting will be crummy. Hierarchical group based content restrictions? Forget about it.

Confluence does all of those things and then a bunch more, all in one javascript editor (although you need google gears for drag and drop file uploading; which it has, btw, if you have gears installed).

Like I said though, it isn't free. It's enterprise grade software at shareware prices. A ten user license is just a $10 donation to charity through their site.

Just to show you what confluence is like... Atlassian's own documentation page USES Confluence:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/dashboard.action

The only other caveat is that confluence is not designed for the WAMP/LAMP stack. It uses tomcat which means you have to run it on a server with java. So if you're using a remote hosting service it probably won't work for you.

Drez

GothicLargo wrote: »

If you want something a little more polished then Mediawiki, there's also Confluence.

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

Confluence is cheap but not free unless you're an official non-profit or an open source project. However, it's from the people who make Jira (which is a very good product as well), and it does everything Mediawiki does and then some.

Basically, Mediawiki behind the scenes is not, well, done. It's done enough to work for wikipedia (it needs to be lightweight, fast, and easily scalable) but features wise mediawiki tends to make you do whatever you want to do in the most awkward way possible. Adding pictures? Awkward. Adding tables? Awkward. WYSIWYG? You can do it yourself but you'll lose custom wikimarkup and formatting will be crummy. Hierarchical group based content restrictions? Forget about it.

Confluence does all of those things and then a bunch more, all in one javascript editor (although you need google gears for drag and drop file uploading; which it has, btw, if you have gears installed).

Like I said though, it isn't free. It's enterprise grade software at shareware prices. A ten user license is just a $10 donation to charity through their site.

Just to show you what confluence is like... Atlassian's own documentation page USES Confluence:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/dashboard.action

The only other caveat is that confluence is not designed for the WAMP/LAMP stack. It uses tomcat which means you have to run it on a server with java. So if you're using a remote hosting service it probably won't work for you.

Interesting, thank you.

My current problem is that I'm not even sure my webserver supports PHP5. I see some allusions to PHP3, which is bugsome, and I can't figure out how to find out the actual version they have installed.

What kind of requirements do I need for Confluence?

Echo

I use DokuWiki. It's nice and simple.

Drez

I put in a ticket to make sure, but it looks like my server uses PHP4.

MediaWiki requires either PHP 5.30 or 5.32 (5.31 has a bug and isn't supported).
DokuWiki requires 5.12 or higher.

Sigh.

I guess my next question would be: Good/inexpensive hosting company? :P

Drez

Okay it looks like I have PHP 5.2.11 installed. I'm asking them if they can upgrade that but at least in the meantime I will check out DokuWiki. Thanks!

End

You could use a slightly older version of mediawiki if its really a problem, although I'm not sure what features and bugfixes you'd lose.

Edit: Actually, I'm not sure how much older you'd have to go back, which could be a problem in itself.

peterdevore

I think a wiki solution is a bit overkill for what you are looking for. There's no reason to have all the history and moderation features a wiki has just to get some user profiles, and I think that building custom wikipages that collate data from other pages is not an easy thing at all.
I'd look into a content management system, something that's built on either ruby on rails or on python, those are two languages that suit themselves to quick and dirty web 2.0 building.

Æthelred

If you want to know all your PHP configurations, just upload a php file with this in:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

GothicLargo

Drez wrote: »

My current problem is that I'm not even sure my webserver supports PHP5. I see some allusions to PHP3, which is bugsome, and I can't figure out how to find out the actual version they have installed.

What kind of requirements do I need for Confluence?

Well php is easy to test you just create a php file containing the following text, upload it to your server, and call it by browser...

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

As for confluence, you would really need direct command line access and the ability to install new software as it requires a Java JDK, and comes with it's own preconfigured instance of Apache Tomcat.

Delzhand

peterdevore wrote: »

I think a wiki solution is a bit overkill for what you are looking for.

Drupal can be fairly easily configured to do what you want. It requires php4.4, but 5.3 is recommended.