Nice wiki with templating?



  • Hi,

    Following my success with Azure recommendations, I thought I'd consult on this too... I want to create some technical documentation (we have none!). I would like to use a simple wiki that would allow me to create master pages so I can aim for some sort of consistency across the different products I document.

    Any recommendations? In a previous job, I used the SharePoint wiki, and it was absolutely awful. The WYSIWYG editor was anything but, and was even worse outside of IE. I would be happy with something in the cloud, or something that can be hosted on a Windows Server without too much faff.

    Cheers,
    Richard,


  • FoxDev

    depending on how much "faff" you consider getting PHP and IIS to play nice together mediawiki is actually reasonably well supported by IIS



  • Confluence, Basecamp.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    getting PHP and IIS to play nice together

    I've not tried it recently but this used to be trivial. Surprisingly really considering it involves PHP and IIS.


  • FoxDev

    @loopback0 said:

    I've not tried it recently but this used to be trivial.

    likewise

    @loopback0 said:

    Surprisingly really considering it involves PHP and IIS.

    quite.



  • Must admit, I did briefly consider mediawiki, but the PHP/IIS stuff looked horrible at a glance. However, you guys have pushed me, and I've now got PHP working on IIS. I'll keep plugging away in my spare time and see if I can get all of the bits for mediawiki going.

    Basecamp and Confluence look very swish, but seems they do a whole load more. And cost money. Hmm... one day...



  • I hate to say it, but the wiki world is awful right now. MediaWiki is the best wiki, and it's literally a pile of oozing parasite-infected cattle dung. ScrewTurn wasn't bad but apparently isn't supported anymore.

    If you want something that's not-just-a-wiki, various project management systems have built-in wikis. I know Redmine has one, haven't used it yet, and then there's the WTF of actually getting a Ruby application installed and operating normally. I'm sure Basecamp and others have something as well.

    Perhaps we should start a WTFWiki project and make one that doesn't suck.


  • BINNED

    @mott555 said:

    and then there's the WTF of actually getting a Ruby application installed and operating normally

    +∞

    @mott555 said:

    Perhaps we should start a WTFWiki project and make one that doesn't suck.

    Oh boy...

    EDIT: I'd rather call it WTFisThisShit. I think it encapsulates the spirit of a wiki well.



  • @Onyx said:

    WTFisThisShit

    You would not believe how many times this word was implied when me and my business partners were attempting to do some basic administration tasks to a private MediaWiki install....like fix a partner's forgotten password, or delete an account, or even find out where the hell you need to go to do anything to someone's account.





  • :rolleyes:



  • I haven't tried to deal with hosting a dedicated wiki, but having managed Redmine installations, I prefer Textile wiki formatting (which incidentally makes the popularity of Markdown really annoying to me) and therefore, when it comes to cloud-hosted, PBWorks.

    At least, last time I checked.



  • Throwing random 2¢ ideas around:

    • Doxygen is still pretty decent if you want to create docs from comments in your source code (where they may have a >0% chance of remaining updated)—it can output HTML, so having that automatically publish to a local webserver is feasible.

    • If you just want a wiki and you don't want to mess around with setting anything up, fossil has a basic wiki built in (along with basic issue tracking, DVCS and a web interface). It takes literally 5 minutes to set up a fossil instance, it's ridiculously easy.



  • Thanks for the various suggestions.

    I battled for a while with getting MediaWiki onto Windows Server, and it was working (but there were some rough edges). And now it's all rendered a bit pointless, since there is a general push for Office 365 for all sorts of things. I've caved in and decided that it makes sense to use the online SharePoint features, although the wiki is a bit horrid (the editor, mainly).


  • BINNED

    @richw said:

    online SharePoint features

    Welcome to the dark side!

    :manical_laughter:



  • It's certainly a bit dark! The online Exchange 'just works', so I can see how it's nicer than farting about with hosting your own. But some stuff is just odd... OneDrive? As well as online documents in SharePoint?


  • BINNED

    @richw said:

    OneDrive?

    OneDrive for Business ... please use the right names or Balmer has to start sweating again.

    I don't see your issue though: OneDrive for Business is like a personal home folder. I store stuff there that is only for me (like data used in calculations, temporary stuff, draft versions, ... I even dropped the old .pst backup there). While SharePoint itself is the big old ugly share where everybody can read (and write) my files.
    I used to have two shares, now I have again two locations. Nothing new. OneDrive for Business is just the old personal SharePoint site it always was. E.g. MS automatically makes a site with limited rights for every user.
    Now only if the damn sync tool was up to something ... what good is unlimited storage if the sync tool can't handle that much or even exclude sub-folders.



  • I see.

    What would be peachy, then, is an option to sync it with my 'my documents' (or whatever I want) so that the stuff on my laptop, which could get stolen or run-over etc. is backed-up. And it would be handy to be able to grab a file when not on my work laptop.

    I guess the clever bit will be getting people to make the distinction between 'my' (onedrive) and 'the business' (sharepoint).


  • BINNED

    @richw said:

    the distinction between 'my' (onedrive) and 'the business' (sharepoint).

    MS screwed that one up by use the same name for several things. OneDrive (customer cloud), OneDrive (customer - sync tool), OneDrive (business cloud) & OneDrive (business & sharepoint sync tool)



  • @richw said:

    I guess the clever bit will be getting people to make the distinction between 'my' (onedrive) and 'the business' (sharepoint).

    To be fair to Microsoft, in about three months time, they'll probably change all the names again in yet another rebranding, so it's a bit premature to start complaining about the names they currently have...



  • @Luhmann said:

    SkyDrive (customer cloud), Live Mesh (customer - sync tool), SharePoint Workspaces (business cloud) & Groove (business & sharepoint sync tool)
    Can I have 2007 back please? It was full of awesome, and things had actual names...


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