[pmwiki-users] Selecting a Wiki engine...

[Crisses]

On Oct 2, 2006, at 12:50 PM, Oliver Betz wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> running several (currently broken) PhpWiki based wikis, I'm strongly
> considering to switch to a better maintained Wiki engine. PmWiki is
> on the top, I will also check DokuWiki and maybe Mediawiki again.
>
> Since I'm no PHP programmer (I'm doing embedded stuff in "plain C"),

You might be surprised how similar PHP is to c/c++.  There are  
distinct differences, but reading the code should be relatively  
simple (compared to, say, perl ;) ).

> For example, I read that Mediawiki has a "suboptimal" code with many
> globals, rather hard to maintain. Well, I have to believe it. Obvious
> for me is that Mediawiki has no option to purge the page history,
> that's a severe disadvantage for me (limited storage in hosted
> environment, maybe performance issues).

PmWiki allows you to purge history -- by setting (the next page edit  
after X days), or by hand.

> Availability: although I see that Patrick R. Michaud and the very
> active community do a great job improving PmWiki, I would like to
> know whether there are more (potential) "core" developers, IOW
> whether there is a good change that PmWiki will be maintained even if
> PM stopped development some day.

Yep.

I might tear it apart and make it more object oriented ;)  But then  
that would only be the "if Patrick got hit by a bus" option.

Others probably know more of the PmWiki core than me, but I'd be  
willing to work on a team on the core.

> Security: is PHP really that bad (e.g. compared Perl) in terms of
> security? The PmWiki code didn't seem to have many security issues in
> the past. Is it written more defensive than other applications?

1) You can't have SQL injection problems when there's no SQL :)
2) we have our share of page vandals
3) we have found vulnerabilities and squished them, but none (TMK)  
have been wild exploits

> So many questions - maybe someone can point out whether or why PmWiki
> is the best choice...

whether is a judgement call.  This was my first wiki, my only wiki.   
I've been here at least since about 2002, maybe earlier.  I can't  
remember.  I've tried CMS systems, blogging packages, learning  
management software, and worst of all e-commerce systems, and I  
always want to come back home to PmWiki. :P

Why:

user/author-centric -- we go out of our way on the coding side to  
make things easier for the people writing
Solid extensible core
Modules don't break the core
Responsive community
Community small enough to remain consolidated -- lots of people here  
have been here as long or longer than I have
One core developer means all us other code junkies can get busy  
writing extensions ;)
the core developer is responsive to anyone with a demonstrable need
core extensions only happen if it's useful to many environments  
(there will be a shopping cart module -- but NOT in the core!)
the core footprint is still under 2MB -- and that's a rule of thumb  
that has been maintained throughout
strong internationalization support
world-wide community support 24/7/365 ;)
We don't say "you can't do that" we provide hacks and snippets or ask  
Patrick to add a hook to make it possible ;)

I'm sure I left some things out ;)

Crisses