To Wiki or Not to Wiki
I have been trying to decide if it is worth running a wiki on sbutler.com but I am not convinced of the usefulness of doing so. Other options would be a CMS such as Mambo, or just HTML pages. Lets take a look at some of the features of a wiki:
- Collobarative editing: A useful feature but other systems, suchs as CMS already have this functionality.
- Content edited in wiki syntax: No real advantage to inventing your own syntax when HTML is already widely understood. Also if ease of use is a concern there are always WYSIWYG editors that integrate into your site, such as the powerful TinyMCE which is used by the Mambo CMS.
- Templating: Nothing new here.
- Linking & creating pages: This is definately a real advantage of wiki systems. Where as a CMS will likely require you to add a new article, with wikis this is taken care of automatically by either using CamelCase or some other link pattern that is a part of the specific wiki syntax.
- Searching: Nothing new here, most CMS already allow this.
- Versioning: This is a clever feature but it is only really useful if you are deploying your wiki in a collobartive environment and you don’t trust your wiki users.