The topic of the month is Wikis. “Wiki Wiki!” is Hawaiian for “quick, quick!” and is a pattern of presenting a read-write web site. There are more variations and implementations than grains of sand in the universe. but we’ll look at a couple of them, specifically:
- Twiki, written in Perl, running gnhlug.org (http://twiki.org)
- MediaWiki, written in PHP, storage in MySQL, which runs Wikipedia.org (http://mediawiki.org)
- Dokuwiki, also in PHP (http://www.dokuwiki.org/)
- Redmine, written in Ruby, which includes a wiki module. (http://www.redmine.org/)
We’ll talk a little bit about the range of markup languages, the technology behind the wiki, the social and community aspects of how a wiki works (or doesn’t), and how Free/Open Source has played into the success of wikis.
Recommended Reading: “The Wiki Way, Quick Collaboration on the Web” by Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki) and Bo Leuf, Addison-Wesley, 2001, ISBN 0-201-71499-X and http://wiki.org/. We’ll have a copy there for your browsing.
Comments from other members suggest we might also want to look at:
MindTouch (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dekiwiki/)
Wekkid https://launchpad.net/wikkid
Wikipedia’s entry on Wikis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_software and
a list of software with comparisons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wikis
and http://www.wikimatrix.org/
My most active Wiki experience: http://fox.wikis.com (Not open source, either in implementations nor base language).