Yesterday I wrote about trying to use TikiWiki to set up a wiki for a client.  The wiki is supposed to have both public and private sections.   Today, I spent some time evaluating MediaWiki for that purpose.

I’ve used MediaWiki as an end user many times.  Wikipedia is the canonical example, of course, but there are others, such as Wiktionary and Wookiepedia.  From that perspective it works quite well, so I hoped that it would be suitable for this purpose.

I started poking around in the documentation to find out how to create groups of users and pages, assign rights, etc.  You can do all of it, provided that you’re willing to edit or write a little PHP code.  That’s fine for me; I’ve written thousands of lines of PHP, most of it a lot more complex than is required in this case.  For my client, however, that’s a deal breaker.  They aren’t programmers and don’t want to fiddle around with code.  They want an administrative interface that lets them point and click.  There are a lot of extensions, but none provides such an interface, so far as I could tell.  It’s a shame, really, as the rest of the software works nicely.

To be fair, the documentation advises that MediaWiki is not designed for private wikis.  This isn’t really a criticism of the project for not providing what I need, just an expression of disappointment.