Has anyone used Wikis to create highly customized and scalable website that does not look like Wikipedia? Answers.com Wiki is one that I know of. If yes, how much of an effort was to customize the existing code or create new templates/plugins? Which Wiki platform was used?
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Wikipedia itself is using MediaWiki, which is highly customizable, and is known to be a wiki system with high scalable ability.
You can try some pre-made templates by searching through web, for example here. If you want to create your own template, it's not hard if you are familiar with HTML and CSS.
Francis
2009-05-05 05:45:18
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http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_wikis#List_of_largest_other_wikis reports that besides MediaWikis, the largest recognisable wiki engine in use seems to be TWiki. See also mediawiki.org. Maybe you just need a nice skin for MediaWiki, to avoid "looking like Wikipedia".
pfctdayelise
2009-05-05 06:07:08
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Mahalo.com uses Mediawiki, and it doesn't look anything like Wikipedia at all.
One of the advantages of Mediawiki is that it's vast library of extensions can do almost anything, so you won't need to write new code. Since it's open source and free if you do need to modify it there is a large community of developers out there willing to help you.
Adrian Archer
2009-05-06 18:19:44
Thanks Adrian. It would be interesting to know how much time and effort did Mahalo put in customizing the MediaWiki code. Also, what do they do to merge their own forked code branch with MediaWiki core whenever critical releases are made.In my experience sometimes, seemingly cheap solutions turn out to be more expensive if you need to fork off from main branch of code.But it also depends upon how much customizations are needed and who is doing it and so forth.Hope someone from Mahalo.com can answer.
2009-05-07 18:12:54
Mahalo seems to use Mediawiki version 1.9.3, and the latest is version 1.14.0. I guess they just aren't making updates? I know they're releasing Mahalo 2.0 very soon, so maybe now would be the time to twitter @JasonCalacanis and ask him.
Adrian Archer
2009-05-07 20:35:04
You could also ask this question on Mahalo Answers.
Adrian Archer
2009-05-08 22:30:28
You don't need to fork the code to change the appearance. Other examples of mediawiki sites that don't look like wikipedia: http://tmbw.net/wikihttp://www.chickipedia.com/
Matt G
2009-05-24 03:12:13
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Hi Roger,
I'm curious to know what you think XWiki would not be able to achieve. As you can see on http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/References/ the l&f are pretty various.
I'm one of the XWiki developers so if you have a specific need let me know and I should be able to tell you if it can be done.
You could also post on the XWiki mailing list/forum (search google for "xwiki mailing list" - I'm limited to 1 hyperlink here since I'm a new user apparently... sigh...)
Thanks
Vincent Massol
2009-08-08 22:14:25
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We used a highly customized site that looks nothing like mediawiki cityultima dot com and http://www.uk-online-takeaway.com a lot of the functionality was developed before mediawiki developed it, and there was a fair bit of cost involved in designing the site.
In terms of cost we are talking about 1 years of experimental development by a couple of guys based outside the uk.
paul
2010-08-28 11:47:54