Any wiki suggestions?

[jducoeur]

Time for the next bit of tech for work: I'm looking for a good wiki. CommYou probably needs a couple of wikis -- one on the internal development server on "how you build this thing", and one on the soon-to-be public server for documentation. (I'm leaning towards a wiki for my documentation, since it allows me to open it up to trusted members of the community to help out. In general, one thing I think LJ's done right is getting the community involved.)

Anyway, there are about six million wiki platforms out there, so I'm curious whether my friends have any suggestions of good ones. My needs include:

• I'm more interested in ease of maintenance than most other features: I'd like something that's fairly easy to get configured up and running.


• I don't think I need massive power and complexity -- my needs are pretty straightforward. Some straightforward way to include images would be Very Useful, though. (This is an aspect that many wikis fall down on.)


• It needs to be stylable, but that mostly means that I should be able to apply CSS easily.


• I lean slightly towards something based on JVM/MySQL, since those will certainly be installed and working on the servers, but I'm open to Perl/PHP/whatever, so long as it's a common platform.


• Decent access control is utterly crucial, so I can open editing up to specific members of the community while keeping admin privs locked down. This is *not* going to be editable by the general public, so some kind of group management would be helpful.


• The ability to shove all the wiki framing out of the way would be Very Nice: for purposes of the average reader, I'd prefer that it look a bit more like a conventional web page.

So basically, I need something that's more powerful than basic WikiWikiWeb or ProWiki, but MediaWiki may be overkill for my purposes. (And I don't love its standard look-and-feel anyway -- it just *screams* "wiki" rather than "webpage".)

Opinions? Eventually I'll probably switch over to using Querki, but I really can't afford the month needed to get that project bootstrapped right now...

Comments

[jducoeur]

Oh, and PS:

you were out of the 'entry level' arena long before Java became a defacto standard in it, for example.

Oh, sure. I mean, I started doing really hard-core Java programming back in, what?, I guess 1996. (During the Netscape/IE 3 generation.) At the time, I was writing what may well have been the most sophisticated applet in the world: a self-installing, self-modifying, cross-browser multimedia client applet for an educational MUD we were building for the DoD. Fun stuff, and at the time it *was* quite cutting-edge -- indeed, the idea of an object-heavy language like Java was still controversial, and there was a lot of resistance to the idea that you could do "real" work in it. But that was a while ago now...