Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

I’ve been trying to find a wiki engine that suits my needs and at the moment I quite like Wikka partly because I’ve managed to meet a few of the items on my criteria list below.

A Good Wiki Should…

• Look nice:
  Let’s face it, most look terrible, most seem to want to look terrible, it scares people.
• Separate Interface From Content: Visually that is. All too often the “edit” link looks the same as MyLovelyLink, but they “do” very different things; navigation is not interface.
• Easily Handle Media and Documents: Yes text is a lovely thing, but so are pictures, PDFs (did I say that?), movies and spreadsheets… they should be handled as well as wiki pages with versioning and linkability etc. You should also be able to add an image to wiki page by simply uploading the image, why would you then want to hack in some code to that page to point at it.
• Auto-backlink: The “backlink” feature of a wiki, which items link to this one, is one of it’s strongest features. It’s like automatic navigation that comes for free, why hide it behind a link?
• Show Recent Changes on the HomePage: Wikis are about change. Wikis are for content creators, let them see what’s been happening since they last dropped by.
• Offer RSS newsfeeds: Of course
• Have A “Simple Syntax”: Ideally I’d like wikis to let you drop your own particular flavour of syntax into the mix. I have chosen not to use certain wikis because, if a wiki is to be about collaboration, then the syntax will be new to many of the people involved, so it needs to be easier than HTML and not look like bastard offspring from a 70s programming language.
• Use A WYSIWYG Editor: Of course I’d like to be able not even think about the syntax and just create, who wouldn’t?
• Handle Spam: It happens and it’s a shame, handle it.
• Have Permissions: Many collaborative efforts need to happen in private and not require me hacking a .htaccess file (or even knowing what one is).
• Be Easily Hackable: Now this is complex one, because in order to create a system that is extendable (without being easily breakable) you get complex. I can’t decide whether it is better for code to be modular and adaptive or for you to have to just dive in and hack away. Ideally I’d like to edit wiki code in the wiki, predictive typing etc
• To Be More Than Just A Page: This is on my “if only” wishlist. Of course the strength of a wiki is that a page is a page is a page but at times I’d like to create a certain type of page that had a number of fields (say “Name”, “Address”, “Telephone Number”) so that I could help people to create great wiki content. Of course it may be saved into a standard wiki page, but would be able to spot the page’s type and load the data into the right editing form.

What other factors would affect your choice of wiki engine?