# mediawiki or twiki?

## afrosteve

I'm looking to install a wiki and have narrowed down my choices to mediawiki or twiki.  

I was looking at twiki because it claims to be designed for enterprise collaboration, which is kind of what I'm going for.  However I'm wondering if twiki not using a database would be a bad thing?  It's also masked in portage.

Mediawiki looks good because so many people use it, and it's not masked in portage.  The documentation seems to suggest that it requires mysql, but the package has a postgres flag, so I assume it's ok to use with postgres.  Is it?  If I'm already running postgres, should I run mysql just to use mediawiki?

I'm open to suggestions.

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## d2_racing

If you want to start, why don't you use MediaWiki to have some support from this forum  :Smile: 

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## mudrii

try to use wiki with DB the speed in time will go down on text base wiki

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## Rob1n

The database or lack of it makes very little (if any) difference to a wiki.  A database is designed for querying a large amount of unsorted data, whereas with a wiki you're (usually) making a single retrieval for each page and you know exactly what you want to retrieve and where it is.  I went through the same line of research a few months ago for work and ended up going with TWiki.

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## afrosteve

Rob1n, have you liked TWiki so far?  Any complaints?

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## bobber205

I have installed Mediawiki and used it.

Easiest thing I've done in quite awhile!   :Cool: 

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## Rob1n

 *afrosteve wrote:*   

> Rob1n, have you liked TWiki so far?  Any complaints?

 

I've had no issues so far - simple to set up and plugins for everything I've needed to do.  Performance is pretty good, though I don't really have anything to compare it against as I didn't try the other wikis.

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## Tintamarre

Did somebody tried DokuWiki ? I think, It's the best one to use when there are only few users (less than 30). It's very simple, easy, and very customizable.

MediaWiki, I think is for big and wide project.

I tried WakkaWiki, TWiki, MediaWiki, DokuWiki, TiddyWiki, PmWiki, and PhpWiki [I really love to test stuff] - DokuWiki and MediaWiki are the best but each one for different purpose.  :Smile: 

DokuWiki and MediaWiki are in portage :

```

gentoo ~ # emerge -s dokuwiki

Searching...   

[ Results for search key : dokuwiki ]

[ Applications found : 1 ]

 

*  www-apps/dokuwiki

      Latest version available: 20070626b

      Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]

      Size of files: 1,186 kB

      Homepage:      http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki

      Description:   DokuWiki is a simple to use Wiki aimed at a small companies documentation needs.

      License:       GPL-2

```

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## afrosteve

I hadn't considered DokuWiki.  I was mostly going off of this old ONLamp article comparing wikis. 

 *Quote:*   

> DokuWiki and MediaWiki are the best but each one for different purpose.  

 

What are the purposes?  I do have less than 30 users, so DokuWiki may be a better choice.

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## Tintamarre

MediaWiki got a very good software for tracing contributions and restore version. These features are very good when you want to create an open Wiki (Wikipedia, gentoo-wiki, etc.). 

DokuWiki is easier, smaller, and more flexible (a lot of plugin available) and really better for a predefined group that only need a Wiki to write things together. MediaWiki is also used for negotiating, voting and discussion.

An example of very useful plugin that doesn't exist on MediaWiki is the export to PDF through TeTeX plugin. I use it for exporting to PDF pages written by my laboratory at university.

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## ADMIN_LINUX

It helps to download a few viruses. Helps with constipation

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## afrosteve

Thanks ADMIN_LINUX!  That's an excellent point!  Is 'constipation' a package on portage?  I haven't heard of it!

Thanks of the explanation of MediaWiki and DokuWiki, Tintamarre.  I appreciate it.  

I guess I'll start trying these out and see which works better.

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## Insanity5902

I just went through the comparison of MediaWiki and TWiki, I ended up going with TWiki. 

I like being able to change the theme, I ended up using the NatSkin w/ their plugin, which really make for a nice interface and I really like the gui editing (it isn't wysiwyg, but similar to mediawiki's toolbar, just a lot better).

The loading performance of the pages was a bit slow, but moving to the mod_perl fixed that a lot.  It is said it will slow down searching, but honestly I don't see information being searched for as we are using this as an internal documentation wiki, which means people will know what they want to get to.

The other thing I really like about it is it's plugin, there are some really nice plugins out there that make editing the pages really simple.  I am happy with what we have so far.  I wouldn't mind testing out dokuwiki and tikiwiki in the future.

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## 401.unauthorized

Personally, I do not like the syntax that TWiki uses and I'd prefer MediaWi over it. In case you need a solution with user management, have a look at Tiki CMS. 

If you are looking for a MySQL/PHP based wiki in general, go to OpenSourceCMS.org where you can log into a live system and try out whatever you want. Databases are being refreshed every 2 hours. CMS Matrix may also be useful for you.Last edited by 401.unauthorized on Tue Sep 04, 2007 12:14 am; edited 1 time in total

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## Insanity5902

See, that is one thing i like about TWiki, it's syntax actually makes sense to me

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## 401.unauthorized

 *Insanity5902 wrote:*   

> See, that is one thing i like about TWiki, it's syntax actually makes sense to me

 

 :Smile: 

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## hawaiian717

 *Tintamarre wrote:*   

> An example of very useful plugin that doesn't exist on MediaWiki is the export to PDF through TeTeX plugin. I use it for exporting to PDF pages written by my laboratory at university.

 

You mean something like this plugin?

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Export

 :Smile: 

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## Insanity5902

Update ::

I've been playing with dokuwiki for my personal wiki, and I've found it quite nice.  Very small and compact.  It has no DB and starts to slow down after 750 pages or so.  Which shows it isn't ready for larger sites yet, but the simplicity and speed make it very useful for smaller ones.  It provide fine grain controls and access on all the pages too, which is very nice.

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## afrosteve

I ended up installing Dokuwiki and I'm pretty pleased with it so far.  

I'm doing a pretty small time thing, which seems to fit with design goal of the system.

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## Tintamarre

Great afrosteve.  :Smile: 

 *hawaiian717 wrote:*   

>  *Tintamarre wrote:*   An example of very useful plugin that doesn't exist on MediaWiki is the export to PDF through TeTeX plugin. I use it for exporting to PDF pages written by my laboratory at university. 
> 
> You mean something like this plugin?
> 
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Export
> ...

 

Not exactly like this one. It doesn't include Footnotes and Page break, generate Table of Content, ... etc. 

DokuTeXit do it.

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