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.
A client is interested in using a wiki for internal documentation. After a brief discussion, they installed TikiWiki via SimpleScripts, a nice little service supported by their web hosting company. We were asked to figure out the permissions model and create an area, accessible only to their employees, to house the documentation.
I took a look at TikiWiki’s web-site and was immediately concerned. They have a laundry list of features provided by the software, mostly well outside of the functionality of a wiki: blogs, fora, newsletters, polls, news, bug tracker, etc. In my experience, programs that attempt to do so many things rarely do any of them well. Nonetheless, I dove into the documentation and tried to figure out how to meet the client’s needs.
