[pmwiki-users] Annoying question: Why do people switch to PmWiki?

[Alan Hoyle]

On 3/8/07, Donald Z. Osborn <dzosborn at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've asked this before without getting any echo, but since there are some
> folks who have apparently switched to PmWiki from other wiki software, I'm
> interested to hear what their rationale was and what they feel about their
> experience since.

I used PhpWiki for a while and never really got it to work right.
Installation was somewhat complex, and it didn't ever really play nice
with text files.  It ended up getting corrupted several times, so I
eventually gave up.

I looked at other non-DB based options and tried out a few of them.
Several ended up getting rejected pretty quickly, but I found two that
I got installed and used for a while:  TWiki (perl-based) and PmWiki.

I preferred the TWiki interface for a few things and liked the wiki
language, but setup in my environment was way, way harder.  PHP is
supported without any effort by the web servers I have access to,
while Perl requires me asking the server administrators to set up CGI
spaces and other various annoyances.

With PmWIki, I can unzip, configure, create a directory and set the
permissions on it and be up and running in a matter of minutes.
Several other folks around campus here have wanted wikis, and I've
sent them brief instructions, and they've managed to get their own
setup pretty easily.  I also set up more than one wiki for my group,
and just yesterday I converted 3 wikis to a single wikifarm, created a
new one, and I couldn't be happier.  Well, maybe if I could finally
get LDAP authuser to work, but I've only briefly messed with that....

-alan

-- 
   Alan Hoyle  -  alanh at unc.edu  -  http://www.alanhoyle.com/
     "I don't want the world, I just want your half." -TMBG
                Get Horizontal, Play Ultimate.