MediaWiki vs Twiki

MediaWiki

I installed MediaWiki recently. It was pretty easy to install and get up and running. I started using it with a small group of staff members.

No User Permissions

All was going well until I realized there were no permissions on the pages. There was no way to give ownership rights. I thought this would be important to (a) stop people accidentally delelting posts; (b) prevent too much re-authoring of pages. This might seem to go against the very ethos of the wiki movement but I had been asked several times what’s to stop people monkeying around with pages and entries. Like any professional organisation, people are territorial and protective of their work. I had assured everybody that there were mechanisms to protect pages which authors/owners could set. I had to remember, that (a) we’re taking baby steps here, and (b) codification is more important at this stage than openness. The permissions I had touted turned out not to be possible with MediaWiki out of the box:

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Other restrictions

You may want to have pages editable only by their creator, or ban viewing of history, or any of a number of other things. Neither of these features are available in an unhacked version of MediaWiki. If you need more fine-grained permissions, see the #See also section for links to other wiki packages that are designed for this, as well as hacks that attempt to contort MediaWiki into something it’s not designed to be but may work anyway.http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access#Other_restrictions

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I decided to take a look at a couple of other packages: DekiWiki and Twiki.

Twiki

Twiki is pitched as an enterprise level wiki. It is way more than we need getting started but it does fulfilll a number of criteria: it has fine grained permissions and it looks like a traditional wiki. That was enough for me to get started.

Installation

Twiki has a number of install options: source code, installer bundle, VMWare platform. I took the middle option and downloaded most of what I needed: Twiki Release 4.2.0: zip. I downloaded and installed Perl from ActiveState. There are copious notes and instructions on Twiki so I won’t regurgitate here.

Perl error

The one thing that tripped me up for a few hours, that I want to mention, was configuring Perl. I got the following error when configuring Twiki. I kept getting: Permission denied at ../tools/rewriteshbang.pl line 71. At first I thought it was permissions on the files within, but it turned out the problem was my folders were “Read Only” (Windows XP). Simple to fix but cost me a couple of hours. Here’s a screen shot of the code – check out item #15.

That’s as far as I’ve got so far. More progress reports when I have them.

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DekiWiki

I checked out DekiWIki as well. It looked and behaved really well. However, I felt that users might get mixed up between it and our intranet. It looks more like a website than a wiki. This seems to be a trend in wikis… world’s colliding – wikis, websites, groupsites, self-authoring sites, mysites, personal homepages… All good stuff but I want something more traditionally “wiki” for this instance.