[Techtalk] wikis yet again

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2007 at 03:52:52PM -0700, Maria McKinley wrote:
> I know we have talked about wikis before, but I don't remember TWiki 
> coming up in the discussion (and the one thing I truly dislike about 
> mailman is the inability to search the archives efficiently...). TWiki 
> seems to have a lot of the features I am looking for, so just wondering 
> if anyone has any experience with it and can comment on it.

I looked at TWiki, and it did seem to be nice, but the deal-breaker for
me was that upgrading to a new version was very painful (basically
involved moving your entire wiki to a backup directory, installing the
upgraded wiki, moving your content back, and then re-applying all your
configuration changes by hand).

Wheras with PmWiki (which is what I ended up going with) upgrading was
painless:

        tar xzvf pmwiki-(version).tgz
        cp -a pmwiki-(version)/* /path/to/pmwiki/dir

All the content and configuration and plugins in PmWiki are set up
deliberately so that they aren't over-written by an upgrade.
It's also very intelligent with the "system" wiki pages; (that is,
things like the built-in documentation and wiki-settings pages) -- all
"system" wiki pages are in their own directory (wikilib.d) while all
user-created wiki pages are in their own separate directory (wiki.d) --
and if one creates one's own version of a "system" page, then (a) it
goes into wiki.d and (b) wiki.d is searched first, so that it overrides
the default page (which is as one would want it).

With TWiki, all wiki pages are in the same directories; therefore when
you upgrade you have to move the pages away and then move them back by
hand (making sure you don't overwrite the "system" pages).

As I said, painful.

Kathryn Andersen
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