Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 08/21/06 issue

Hands on: Running a wiki

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Perhaps the chief benefit of a wiki is that it’s easier to update than regular Web pages. You don’t need to know HTML, nor do you need specialized Web design software such as Adobe ColdFusion, Microsoft FrontPage or any of a number of different Web content management programs. With those applications, you add content to a copy of a Web page and then upload the finished product to the Web server.

With a wiki, you simply click on the Edit button of a live wiki page and make the required changes right there. No more uploading. Hyperlinking is just as easy—it just requires pasting the URL into the text.

And linking to another wiki page is simpler still. Wiki software automatically creates new pages out of any phrase rendered in CamelCase—compound words with the first letter of each word capitalized. For instance, type “TestPage” and the wiki software creates a link to that new page with that name ready to edit.

Building a wiki—GCN’s experiment

However easy to use, setting up a wiki can still take some system administrator chops and a bit of time, if our test run was any indication.

When we set out to deploy a wiki for a small group project, we found no shortage of free wiki packages that we could use. The helpful WikiMatrix (www.wikimatrix.org) Web site stepped us through a Wizard-like process to determine which best suited our needs. We wanted a free version that could run on a Linux server that we’d leased from a Web hosting company. We had access to Perl and to CGI services, which resided on that server, but did not have access to a database. WikiMatrix returned a list of wiki software packages that met our criteria: DidiWiki, KeheiWiki, KWikiKWiki, MoinMoin, Oddmuse, ProWiki, TiddlyWiki, TWiki and UseMod.

We randomly chose ProWiki (www.prowiki. com). German developer Helmut Leitner created ProWiki and made it available free, but he also offers a commercially supported version.



GCN Popup