Wiki’s are all the rage these days and for good reason. They allow online communities to compile massive amounts of information and they are a wonderful platform for internal information sharing.
I’ve been tinkering with different wiki options for a while, and out of all of them I like PmWiki the best. It is simple to setup, has great skinning options and the syntax is far less cumbersome than some of the other major players.
When working with wikis previously, one of they biggest problems I had was with the CamelCase linking system. This feature, which turns words strung together, such as ‘GoDaddy,’ into links to new pages automatically is cumbersome, especially in technical documentation where company names and products often are spelled in this fashion. One of my favorite features in PmWiki is that this is turned off by default and you simply specify internal links/new pages with the simple [[linkname]] syntax.
They also have a simple, yet effective toolbar you can activate to take some of the pain out of the learning process when it comes to formatting. It wasn’t too long though until I started to skip the toolbar and simply format as I went with the formatting syntax.
I’m planning on setting up an intranet with documentation for the software we use everyday at work. With more than 50 people, managing Word documents and printing can become a hassle quickly and the more documentation I create the harder it is to manage and keep up to date. Hopefully switching to a wiki based system will help provide quicker documentation delivery to everyone involved.
After thorough testing I plan to setup wiki spaces for other areas of the organization where they could be utilized. In evaluating wiki’s, usability for a non-technical worker was a major consideration. While PmWiki doesn’t have a full fledged GUI editor, it’s barebones setup works more reliably than those that did – at least in the free/open source space. Also, its access control isn’t very polished, but seems effective. If I were in a larger organization, I would probably want to look for a system with more robust user management.
So if you are looking to experiment with your own wiki-based solution, I suggest checking out PmWiki. It is free so you have nothing to lose. I’m testing my setup on a Linux machine running in VMWare Server.
Runner up was another solution, DokuWiki. Specifically aimed at doc based wiki’s it has some wonderful features like admin panels, ACL’s and nice theming and GUI editing options. If I wasn’t a bigger fan of PmWiki’s syntax and style, this would be the one to go with.
