[Techtalk] wikis yet again

[Maria McKinley]

Kathryn Andersen wrote:
> 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

Very useful information. Thanks Kathryn. PmWiki is the other one I was 
considering, so I'll just go with that.

cheers,
maria