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

[marc]

Donald Z. Osborn said...
> 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 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
> (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
> than some others I looked into a couple of years ago, but that is probably
> not a factor for people switching to it...

For me, it came down to ease of extensibility, including interfacing 
with other systems. It never ceases to impress me how easy it is to 
create loosely coupled extensions/recipes to interface PmWiki with other 
systems; be it email, a database, another encapsulated system, say, one 
based on EJB, or whatever.

PmWiki is not just a great wiki, but an easy to get going 
platform/framework for web-based development.

I also liked the groups idea - and that it isn't hierarchical - farms, 
the permissions system, wikistyles, authuser and notify, and the 
straightforward conditional markup. You can do quite a lot without ever 
writing a line of PHP - aside from the config files, of course.

Patrick's ongoing development and endlessly patient support is not 
something that I considered when switching, but it's a huge plus in 
retrospect, as are all the folk around here similarly smitten with 
PmWiki who generously give their time.

-- 
Cheers,
Marc