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399

answers:

6

I am looking for a wiki software that would help organize all the informations developers need to do their job correctly and quickly. I have looked at several options (MediaWiki, DokuWiki, Foswiki, MoinMoin), but they all seem very similar. Which do you think would be the best for my requirements, which are the following:

  • Suitable for a team of 10-20 developers.
  • Suitable to store documentation and comments about all the components of the project (but without duplicating our issue tracker of course).
  • Suitable to organize the information in a hierarchy and display a global table of contents in a side panel.
  • Easy integration with other systems, e.g. with an issue tracker.

My idea is to get rid of all our .doc files and to have something like a MSDN for my project, but editable through the web. What would you recommend? What are the real differences between the options?

A: 

You may want to look into Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 - it's an inexpensive and decent starting point for this.

LBushkin
+1  A: 

I think redmine is pretty good stuff

Scott Evernden
A: 

A wiki is ment to be a simple thing. I have used ModWiki for over 6 years.

MediaWiki is bloated. Do you need all that?

Finally why pay the man to use sharepoint that has to be the worst posable pick for a wiki.

+1  A: 

I've used TWiki in the past. I like it. It's very powerful but still based on simple concepts. It features:

  • "normal" wiki behaviour: formatted editing (today it's wysiwyg I think), auto-links, tables, attachments etc.
  • complete revision control.
  • generated text, eg. TOC. There is also a kind of "query". You can make a query to the topics and show title, summary and special 8also user defined fields) in columns. This is very powerful, you don't need to maintain these tables manually.
  • for documentation you can also put topics together by using includes or queries.
  • You can defined predefined texts for reuse ("Twiki Variables");
  • Structured data: in a topic you can define a data structure and assign this as a Twiki Form to any topic. When editing it, it is shown as check boxes, drop downs, text fields etc.
  • Mail notifications
  • Access rights
  • lots of plugins, for instance a powerful spread sheet plugin (with formula resolver etc) and lots of others for almost anything you can think of.

Using these features and some basic html (in topics of course) you can actually write simple web applications.

It stores everything into text files, so you don't need to maintain a database.

There is much more, I forgot about it. These are just the things I miss in other comparable tools. At the end, you need much of this stuff...

Integration into other tools is usually very simple, you can use hyper links to point from one web application to the other, that's usually enough. There are also plugins for some issue tracking systems.

The downside is, it is so powerful that you will spend some time to create your "applications" (but then it scales and can easily be adapted to new requirements). Another problem was to install it on a windows machine without using Cygwin. They simplified this a lot in the last few years. (See the installation guide, "TWiki is straightforward to set-up on Windows"...)

If you think you need something sophisticated, it's worth to try!

Stefan Steinegger
What about Foswiki? I have read that it is the successor of TWiki... Is there any reason to still use TWiki?
Michal Czardybon
To me, TWiki looks still to be a pretty active project. They released version 4.3 while Foswiki is based on 4.2. It might be also advisable to take a look to Foswiki.
Stefan Steinegger
A: 

I have been using Project Kaiser now since half year and I really like it. It has both documentation wiki and issue tracking in a single hierarchical system.

Michal Czardybon
A: 

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