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

[Oliver Betz]

Donald Z. Osborn 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

I'm still in the evaluation process, but you might be interested what 
I found so far. Using PhpWiki for my personal "PIM", I want to switch 
to a better maintained and "better to understand" wiki. I'm 
evaluating the wiki engines also for a new project.

Maybe you want to have a look at the two threads "Selecting a Wiki 
engine" I started 2006-10-02 in this list and 2006-10-04 in the 
DokuWiki list. Please note that the contributions are biased, most 
posters weren't aware of the current development of the "other" wiki.

> I ask because there are people with whom I am in contact who have made
> intimations about the quality of MediaWiki. On the latter I like it a lot

I stopped looking at it long ago, but heared that the code quality 
improves. But it's still the Wikipedia engine, made primarily for 
this purpose and not for you <g>. You should also check whether it is 
still impossible to purge old revisions.

> (per use in Wikipedia) and don't disagree, but I also like PmWiki a lot due
> to its adaptability among other things. Frankly PmWiki was easier to set up

Pros: good documentation, community is very active and helpful, clean 
separation of PmWiki files and user config/data (=> easy update, easy 
backup), customization is very easy and possible for pages, groups or 
the whole site. _Many_ powerful features like page text variables, 
page lists, trails... Configuration in wiki pages makes 
administration easy. Very small core. Seems to be designed carefully 
for robustness more than "neat" extensions.

Cons: Internationalization problems. For example, 8 bit pagenames 
result in 8 bit filenames. You have to be careful which names to 
allow, which tools to use for backup/restore and when migrating to 
another OS.

The search result display (rating, context) is not yet as good as in 
other wikis but shall be improved in the near future according to 
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/RoadMap


DokuWiki:
Pros: Full UTF-8 support. Very simple to setup. Better search result 
display (but less powerful search options). Side-by-side revision 
diffs show changed words (but only in markup, while PmWiki shows also 
rendered diffs). Web based user and ACL management in the core, 
including self-registration by mail. Neat "media manager". Automatic 
saving of "draft" versions during edit. "Breadcrumbs" show navigation 
history.

Cons: Metadata stored apart from page text. Separation of core, 
customization and data not as clear as in PmWiki. Distribution 
doesn't contain full documentation (links to website). Oprhans/wanted 
only as plugin, maybe broken for current version.


Other differences:

PmWiki merges concurrent changes, DokuWiki locks pages. Both methods 
have pros and cons: non-techies could have problems to understand 
PmWiki's merging, and DokuWiki visitors pressing "edit" only to see 
the source lock the page for real editors.

DokuWiki uses more "modern" techniques ("Ajax") to look neat, for 
example to display the title search results "as you type" or a 
reminder when your page lock expires (considered annoying by some 
users). But if you only disallow your browser to change graphics by 
js, you don't even get a correct button bar for editing in DokuWiki.

DokuWiki caches HTML output of pages. This speeds up display, but the 
initial rendering is much slower than in PmWiki. You should avoid 
large (100KiB) pages in both wikis.

DokuWiki mangles pagenames at a selectable level. At least, they are 
converted to lower case. This avoids portability problems. You can 
also convert Umlauts (to ae oe ue) or even romanize the page name. 
Else it's in UTF-8. The advantage is safety/portability, the 
disadvantage is the poor display in page lists.

Documentation internationalization: The DokuWiki distribution is 
already rather complete localized regarding the user interface, but 
not the documentation - it doesn't even contain a German syntax 
reference. Well, you can grab the source from the web site and use 
it. PmWiki tries to provide a complete documentation in any language 
as additional download. Although this is a neat approach, it's a 
maintenance problem - the internationalized documentation likely will 
be behind the English version. The question is where to cut between 
"mandatory" and "optional" localized content.

The PmWiki core is maintained only by Pm, while DokuWiki has four 
"core developers". DokuWiki uses "darcs" revision control system, 
PmWiki uses Subversion.


Other wikis:

There are hosting configurations (Sourceforge) where you can't use 
"plain text" page storage because the web server has no write access. 
Look for wikis using a *sql database.

If you consider using PhpWiki: it has many features, for example 
supports several page storage methods, can search for regular 
expressions etc. Using it since years, I like many of it's 
properties, e.g. the page storage as MIME messages (complete and easy 
to read/modify). But the community disappears and it lacks 
maintenance. http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki-1.2/ says "The 
current 1.3.x phpwiki on sf.net is currently down, due to yet unknown 
circumstances" since 1/2 year!

HTH,

Oliver
-- 
Oliver Betz, Muenchen