The search for the home page tool …. Has taken me to a number of places. These are they, in order.
- Dokuwiki
- PHPWiki
- phpWebThings
- TextPattern (ahhh)
DokuWiki
I love DokuWiki! We had a requirement at my place of work for a way to manage documents, to replace our existing system of putting everything on shared folders in Microsoft Outlook. I looked into a couple of document management apps but came to the conclusion that what I actually needed was a wiki, for the App Support Team to manage its knowledge and keep updating it easily.
DokuWiki is easy. Its easy to set up, and it has no special requirements. It doesn’t even use a database. This could be seen as a disadvantage but since I was installing it in an environment where it is Microsoft SQL Server or nothing, nothing seemed like a good choice. We set up some access control and branded it to match our corporate identity. Its been embraced by everyone and is a great success.
So why aren’t I using it on this site? Mostly because this site is content-controlled by only me, so I don’t actually want a wiki … I did try it out on here, but really it didn’t work as a way to solve this problem.
PHPWiki
PHPWiki should have been the answer. Its widely used and loved, and has a database backend, which seems ideal for this kind of site and since I’m hosting on my own servers I can choose what I like. To cut a long story short, it was kind of complicated to set up, possibly I was being ditsy but I don’t usually have problems setting things up. Once it was installed I just didn’t bond with it at all, so that is the end of that!
phpWebThings
This was a step in the right direction, and a more straightforward installation. It also comes with a cute pink theme which helped its ratings enormously (I know, little things, little minds, etc). I started entering content into it but still hadn’t really made any sense of the admin tools …. when I was still looking for a replacement a week later, I knew that I still hadn’t quite put my finger on it.
TextPattern
A recommendation from a friend (dotjay) and so far, so good!