Sandals and Socks

I have been looking for something more than a wiki lately: something that would allow me to have menus for pages created, to have a blog integrated, to have API documentation pages that could be edited by me (ease of use) and others (community input), and that would support polls and other such things. This crosses the line from wiki to CMS (content management system). Some notable CMS are:

1. joomla:
   1. probably most popular, but apparently its permission system is very basic,
   2. it doesn’t support wiki-type community contributions, and
   3. doesn’t support versioning (a must for me)
2. drupal: very popular, seems to have good permissions system, supports wiki etc.
   1. Uses a module system for extensions, it looked like there were 100’s of modules. This is both a pro and con as it can make it time-consuming to add a capability (first need to find if some modules support it, then see which one supports best, not always easy to find those modules).
   2. But can’t tell from docs if supports versioning of articles, will have to try it I guess. Demo on opensourcecms.com didn’t work well in Firefox but ok in IE.
   3. Extensive online docs and simpler UI seems to make it more approachable than the more sophisticated typo3
3. cmsms (CMS Made Simple): seems nice and minimal which keeps it simple. Unfortunately, version only scheduled for version 2, and no wiki support mentioned (the cmsms site is powered by itself, but the wiki is by mediawiki).
4. tiki CMS: like drupal/joomla but uses the tiki wiki for all features (blogging, polling etc). I think it looks too much like a wiki and not enough like a portal.
5. typo3: very advanced, perhaps a better architecture than drupal,
   1. but steeper learning curve, not obvious what process to follow
   2. online help available but tends to be rather terse; no tutorials found

The wiki-selection engine: http://www.wikimatrix.org/ is a great tool to get which of 100’s of wiki engines satisfy certain criteria. Preferred selection of wikis:

• twiki: it uses Perl (it’s the only one of the list), which could be an issue: how easy is it to setup? could be used on SF.net?
• phpwiki: similar to twiki capability-wise, but written in PHP; doesn’t support SVG editing like twiki does, but supports MySQL and SQLite in addition to file-based repository, whereas twiki is limited to files
• pmwiki: only one to support SVG editing (together with twiki), but a lot of capabilities are from plugins, which can mean a lot of searching and installing
• tikiwiki: comparable to twiki in many ways but written in PHP; doesn’t support SVG editing or complex tables but has other features that twiki doesn’t (more stats pages and database types, e.g.). Note that Tikiwiki is also a CMS: has modules to support blogs, trackers, etc.
• docuwiki: doesn’t support PDF export, but othewise comparable to others
• moinmoin: uses files rather than DB
• wikkawiki: doesn’t support PDF export, but othewise comparable to others

Wikkawiki was preferred choice for wiki that support code highlighting and MySQL and could be set up on SourceForge. I remember trying either phpwiki or pmwiki (believe the latter one) on SF.net and couldn’t get it setup (was easy to screw up setup).