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]

Okay, cool -- good to know you didn't try it and reject it. Since CommYou is based on a JVM/Hibernate/MySQL infrastructure, which is one of XWiki's preferred environments, it's looking like a pretty good candidate for me.

(And FYI, it has a Windows self-installer that's pretty slick: took all of five minutes to get the thing up and running, and I'm playing around with it now. *Damned* impressive stuff -- indeed, powerful enough under the hood that I'm going to have to seriously consider changing course on Querki, and maybe make it an XWiki enhancement instead. It's the first wiki I've come across that already has most of the DB infrastructure that Querki needs. I may play around in my spare time, and figure out how long it would take to get the LARP-writing module adapted to it...)

[laurion]

Sounds nice. Now that I spend my working days on a Windows machine, I'll pull it down and give it a spin.

[laurion]

Oh, I've also found a lot of useful information over at http://www.wikimatrix.org/ ...

[jducoeur]

Oh, yes -- it's just that wikimatrix is so *big* it's kind of overwhelming and hard to use if you don't have some starting points. But I've been using it to compare-and-contrast all of the suggestions I've received so far...