TWiki
 by Catie Flick, in Project Reviews - Sat, Feb 14th 2004 00:00 UTC

I've always been intrigued by the idea of Wikis, but have never really had an opportunity to use one properly until recently.

A Wiki is an easy-to-use collaborative editing environment that often uses a revision control control system to keep tabs on changes made to documents. I was going to use one to keep track of ideas and essay sketches I was writing for my university honors thesis, so I wanted it to be simple, to have a design that was easy to change, and to support user authentication. After reviewing several such projects, I finally settled on TWiki.

TWiki offers a useful solution for sites in which there are different groups working independently who wish to have common or overlapping areas as well. With permissions set up correctly, it offers access control that, although somewhat defeating the "anyone should be able to contribute" purpose, means that it can also be used for less public material, making some Webs invisible to visitors and others read-only, etc.

TWiki is easy to theme (offering several skins that are easily adapted to my requirements), easy to set up, and easy to use. With a small amount of assistance, most of the non-technical people I introduced to it were able to participate in group work and discussion through it. The number of plugins available is also impressive, with a range that includes calendars, pretty-printers, spell checkers, etc. There is also an RSS feed available for each Web. The performance is good, too; it runs speedily enough on a low-end Celeron, without any complaints. Auto-notification is a useful addition to the feature list, though it would be nice if it were enabled by default (instead of requiring the user to specifically add a cron job for it). The configuration of user authentication was a bit fiddly, but the documentation is very good and easy to follow. Despite these issues, it's a fun, easy-to-use tool that is extremely flexible.

Author's bio:

Catie Flick is an honors year university student and "Australian team" freshmeat editor who tinkers with Linux and Mac OS X, cares for her large menagerie of animals, and takes photographs in her spare time. She can be reached at liedra@liedra.net.

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Referenced categories Topic :: Internet :: WWW/HTTP :: Dynamic Content

Referenced projects TWiki - A Web-based collaboration platform.

 Comments

[»] SF Bay Area Expert
by David Q - Dec 23rd 2004 14:47:26

Hey all,
Wondering if anyone is from the SF Bay Area. Doing a school project for a class (Im an MBA at Cal) and would like some help.

Email me at dquiec@yahoo.com if you can meet up and talk.

Thanks~
David

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[»] Firefox/Mozilla Extensions and Wiki's
by Stefan Michalowski - Nov 29th 2004 07:24:07

If you use Firefox or Mozilla for browsing, then you can use the MozEx Extension to edit textareas with your favorite texteditor, be it vim or emacs.

http://mozex.mozdev.org/

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-- Stefan Michalowski /* vim:tw=78:ts=4:sw=4:foldmethod=marker: */

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[»] wiki implementation
by BozMo - Jun 7th 2004 13:36:19

I've looked at most of the available wiki set up's and I am not sure I agree with the last comment that Twiki is poor. I reckon it is the most flexible but requires the most of its users: so you really need a skilled helpdesk manager or whatever to help with nested search syntax and the like. But it can do a lot. Oh and I agree Wiki's are the total business. BozMo

--
BozMo

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[»] wiki's for presentation
by dakoda - Feb 14th 2004 22:10:07

I've found that using wikis as a sort of developer-blog is extremely effective, especially with many people working on different aspects of one project at a time. I've personally used a few different flavors of wikis, and use the TWiki flavor quite regularly. With a few plugins, it becomes a dangerous tool :)

That said, i've seen a somewhat negative trend for some projects to start offering their entire site as a huge wiki. This might seem good in theory, but doesn't seem to work so well in practice. I often find myself spending more time looking for something that "used to be right there", and, in a few cases, finding that what I am looking for is a topic that needs to be created.

Wiki's have a purpose, and serve it very well, but it should be noted that applying them outside that purpose can be bad :) It shouldn't be used for serving up information en masse.

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[»] Wiki Concepts
by George - Feb 14th 2004 13:53:58

I think that the Wiki is actually possibly the best concept that I have seen in a long time. I've spent a lot of time looking at CMSes and CMF's lately, and the fact is that most of these systems are becoming over-bearingly complicated.

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[»] Re: Wiki Concepts
by Alexander Komarov - Apr 2nd 2004 04:07:02

I'd recommend looking at

> MoinMoin, WakkaWiki, phpWiki,

> WikiTikiTavi.

What is the best php based wiki right now?
I run my home page in TWiki, and used to run TWiki site in the intranet of my previous employer, and I like it.
Unfortunatly, my current hosting provider does not like Perl cgi much, allowing only 4 simultanious processes for an account, thus TWiki becomes barely useable :( Now looking forward to migrate to the php based wiki.


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[»] Re: Wiki Concepts
by camoa - May 13th 2004 12:04:00

I think that tikiwiki is doing a great jos at PHP wikis!!! check it out at http://www.tikiwiki.org

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[»] Re: Wiki Concepts
by dfrankow - Jun 5th 2004 09:26:26



> Oh, and if anyone is interested in my

> opinion on this: Twiki was actually one

> of few wiki's that I found to be really

> poor when I evaluated it. It gets way

> too far away from the wiki concept with

> all of the things that have been added

> to it. I'd recommend looking at

> MoinMoin, WakkaWiki, phpWiki,

> WikiTikiTavi.



I found

- Twiki looks fully-featured-looking, but complex
- phpWiki easy to install but simply-featured
- Tikiwiki looks fully-featured but VERY LARGE

Dan



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[»] could be significantly better
by Eric S. Johansson - Feb 14th 2004 05:40:42

having had a fair amount of experience with wikis, including teaching a CEO type how to use them, I have come to the conclusion that they are three-quarters a good tool. The ability to create new pages and using a relatively simple markup language is a wonderful benefit. However, the Web browser based user interface for editing is most politely described as a stinking pile of poo.

In this day and age, there is no excuse for exposing any user to a markup language unless you truly hate your user community. The argument about markup language is giving the user more power may be true in very rare circumstances but in most cases, it is nothing more than bragging about the size of one's technological manhood.

There are any number of tools which provide a nice UI letting the user do all of the wiki operations (style changes, tables, lists etc.) in a familiar and even comfortable way. They can be browser based (editors written in Java/JavaScript) or they can be an extension of existing word processors through plug-ins techniques. Either way, when one provides a nicer user experience, it widens the base of users who are comfortable and confident using wikis as tools for any number of tasks.

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[»] Re: could be significantly better
by Jason Philbrook - Feb 14th 2004 09:02:52


> having had a fair amount of experience
> with wikis, including teaching a CEO
> type how to use them, I have come to the
> conclusion that they are three-quarters
> a good tool. The ability to create new
> pages and using a relatively simple
> markup language is a wonderful benefit.
> However, the Web browser based user
> interface for editing is most politely
> described as a stinking pile of poo.
>
> In this day and age, there is no excuse
> for exposing any user to a markup
> language unless you truly hate your user
> community. The argument about markup
> language is giving the user more power
> may be true in very rare circumstances
> but in most cases, it is nothing more
> than bragging about the size of one's
> technological manhood.
>
> There are any number of tools which
> provide a nice UI letting the user do
> all of the wiki operations (style
> changes, tables, lists etc.) in a
> familiar and even comfortable way. They
> can be browser based (editors written in
> Java/JavaScript) or they can be an
> extension of existing word processors
> through plug-ins techniques. Either
> way, when one provides a nicer user
> experience, it widens the base of users
> who are comfortable and confident using
> wikis as tools for any number of tasks.
>
I agree Wikis are 3/4 of what we need for average people to share and collaborate their information. I set one up at work using phpwiki. A few employees don't like the style of it but it works and they use it. They could code HTML just as easily as using the wiki, but most employees can't code HTML in their sleep. Other (most) employees like what it does and have gotten past the opinions of whether they think the web interface for making changes is ideal. It's better than nothing or editing HTML. We've got more than 500 pages to our wiki at work and a few more every day. We can search it for customer names, equipment, locations, brands, IP addresses, parts, key words of instruction documents, etc.. Each page also has a version history so I can see what changed when by whom. The results are great and the training was minimal.

It's a 85% success. In order to be a 100% success, it would need, like you said, more options for entering information in. I like tables, and tables are too advanced for most wiki using employees to make. I am converting some of them to database, but at immense labor effort to make a web based system for updating the tables for the various ways people use various tables and making them display pretty so that people don't need the wiki to do it.

Can you be more specific about alternatives for people entering data for areas that the wiki isn't fabulous at?

Even if we do have good alternatives for customer data and notes, the wiki is a great place to keep instructions that need frequent changes, work policies, links we want to share with other employees, etc...


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[»] Re: could be significantly better
by Vaughn Cato - Feb 14th 2004 12:04:01

Learning the syntax, even as simple as it is, is still a barrier to acceptance. If you could go to the web page and use Mozilla's Edit Page, then publish the new page, but the server would still keep track of all revisions and allow for search, this would be ideal.

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[»] Wikis are pretty good.
by scott hess - Feb 14th 2004 13:33:24

I think this is all a bit like arguing that a blog isn't a good place to enter structured data. The entire point with a wiki is that you don't have to be concerned with markup. The reason I like using a wiki rather than HTML is *not* because I can't write HTML. It's the same reason I use Perl to solve some problems and C++ others. I can jot down a couple wiki pages, come back a couple days later to polish them a little, then leave it alone. It's mostly unstructured text, with some simple cross-links, very little markup at all. Wiki cross-linking is tons simpler than footnoting, much simpler and it wouldn't be worth entering in the first place.

Having to laboriously markup text is a _barrier_ to capturing certain types of knowledge. It doesn't matter if the markup happens via HTML, XML, or nice pulldown menu items. Markup forces you to invest time in work which doesn't help you in the prototyping phase, which means that people won't brain-dump their _current_ understanding of things, because it doesn't look "pretty".

The only thing I wish was better was integration with other specialized solutions. I want a wiki integrated with a blog (not a blog mode within a wiki, or a wiki mode within a blog). And Sparrow. And other stuff. Let's call it "Notes" :-).

[I "get" blogs, but they aren't that exciting to me, they don't solve a problem I have - though they are certainly fun. The wiki concept does solve problems I've had for _years_, and I would no longer feel comfortable trying to work without one.]

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[»] Re: could be significantly better
by NewMexicoKid - Mar 30th 2004 14:29:46


>
>
> It's a 85% success. In order to be a
> 100% success, it would need, like you
> said, more options for entering
> information in. I like tables, and
> tables are too advanced for most wiki
> using employees to make. I am converting
> some of them to database, but at immense
> labor effort to make a web based system
> for updating the tables for the various
> ways people use various tables and
> making them display pretty so that
> people don't need the wiki to do it.
>

Have you seen the EditTablePlugin for TWiki? It keeps the underlying pipe-delimited table format but adds a form/drop-down-menu editing interface for tables. Adding a new row is possible with just a click of a button.

That being said, I agree that there is a usability gap that is a barrier to widespread deployment of wiki technology. If only there was an emacs or vim plugin for text areas...

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