Hi Rod,
thanks for offering to work on this.
On Tue, 2015-02-17 at 03:24 -0600, R. W. Rodolico wrote:
I have a tech who is wanting additional hours, and she is a fairly good researcher. I'd like to put her on the project of finding a replacement for Dokuwiki. However, before I do, I'd really like to know what we want it to do.
Here are my thoughts. Please feel free to say "yes" or "no" to anything. My feelings will not be hurt. But, I do want Brandy (the tech) to have a clear cut set of requirements before she puts in the time.
I am not too sure if there is any other good alternative that is suitable for our needs but I am sure that we should have a look every once in a while to see what else is out there.
Years ago we use Mediawiki which is great if you have many single pages with one topic on them. We changed to dokuwiki back then because it comes with a sort of directory structure which is very very great for documentation. I have not found any other wiki software that has some similar thing and I guess that this is the main feature that we need: structure.
As mentioned Mediawiki doesn't have that and some other popular wiki softwares that I checked out very more similar to the Mediawiki concept than to the dokuwiki concept.
Maybe it is the best solution to stick with dokuwiki but enhance its functionality with many plugins. There are lots of them but I didn't have the time to check them out.
Requirements:
- HTML
yes :)
- Multilevel tree menu
Yes. Structure is very important for us.
- Keyword searchable
Dokuwiki's search is not the best. If you know the right keyword for what you are searching for you will find everything. This does simply not work in practice because if you are searching for something you don't always know what you are exactly searching for.
Dokuwiki can be extended by using a software called Sphinx to improve search results. Maybe it is worth trying that.
- Full text searchable
Yes.
- User management
We are using the forum's database to authenticate users. Dokuwiki itself only comes with some very basic user management and we don't need anything special here. Just authenticate users against a database and have some groups to grant rights to some internal pages.
We decided using the forum's database so that users don't need to create many accounts.
- Multi-language capable
Yes.
Nice to have
- WYSIWYG editor
I personally prefer writing the wiki language directly.
- Export all or part to PDF or HTML
Printing wiki pages is very common (apparently). I don't know why people do this but having some option to export to PDF would be nice. It is just a very low priority kind of thing.
- Comments on articles (similar to php.net)
Nice idea. I am usually against the commenting thing on the Internet. Mostly because this always leads to endless discussions about the least important things. Maybe it is better to encourage users to edit an article right away instead of getting lots of comments saying "this is wrong/broken. please someone fix this paragraph".
We have the mailing list for discussions. Nobody uses it though.
Anyway, anyone want to add/remove/modify the above? Also, does anyone have a favorite package I should have her look into?
I would like to add that the software should be easy to host. A huge rails application that consumes loads of RAM won't work. I also want really good performance from the wiki. Loading an article should not take a second.
And last of all I wanted to state that Dokuwiki is not that bad. It works very well for us. It is just some stripped-down software that maybe be need to customize a bit. There are so many plugins that could help us with that. It is also written in PHP and enhancing it with own plugins is really easy.
If you want to create an installation to play with I could zip you the data directory and send it to you. So you will have all the data and maybe that is a great point to start with...
Enhancing the current wiki would also save us lots of work instead of migrating the whole thing. History needs to be kept.
-Michael
Rod