One of the first things I did when I arrived at my current job was to whack a copy of mediawiki on one of my servers so that I somewhere to write ad-hoc documentation. As time has passed we have built up quite a few docs and had to lock down the wiki as some of the documents are externally viewable.
It has become apparant that we could do with moving to a wiki that is more suited to our current usage. So my list of wiki requirements is:
- Be able to re-use apache authentication since we already have working mod_auth_pam setups talking to central LDAP.
- Different parts of the wiki editable/viewable by different users.
- Pages can be public or only viewable by logged in users.
- Able to use multiple different auth mechanisms concurrently: e.g Apache,PAM,wiki-login
- Themes/stylesheets for different sections of the wiki
- File upload/attachments. I don’t want people to have to ftp documents and link to them manually.
So far the contenders are Midgard, MoinMoin and TWiki. I’m leaning towards Moin because it’s written in Python. What I’d really like to hear is some comments from people you have similare requirements. What wiki did you go with and what were your experiences?
Thanks
Hi, I administer TWiki for my department. I believe TWiki can handle the functionality you specify:
1. Re-use apache accounts: yes, but I use .htpasswd authentication instead since half the users are external and don’t have or need local accounts. Authentication is specified during configuration.
2. Different parts of wiki viewable / editable: yes, this can be on a site level, a “wikiweb” leve, or a page level. Permission to view and edit can be set seperately and granted to groups, individuals, or all logged in users.
3. Pages viewable publicly or only to logged in users: yes, using same mechanism as above. See TWiki Access Control for more information on setting these permissions.
4. Multiple authentication methods: I don’t know about this one. I know that at configuration there are a few authentication choices, but I don’t know if they can be mixed and matched within the same TWiki deployment.
5. Themes for different areas: yes, TWiki comes with a few dozen skins. I only use the default skin, however. I believe you can also define your own skins. The easiest way to customize TWiki areas is by setting a different logo for each web.
6. File uploads: yes, and you can specify the maximum upload size (or specify no upload). Upon uploading an image file, a user can choose whether to display the image within the page or leave the attachment as a link. I haven’t found a format (images, movies, Microsoft files, PDFs, FITS) that I couldn’t upload, although I’ve experienced time-out problems for files over 15 MB.
TWiki is written in perl. I’m not a perl programmer, but the code is well documented enough that I’ve been able to tinker with it to fix site-specific problems. You can also download any number of CPAN modules for use with TWiki – handy ones for me include calendar functions and PDF generators.
Good luck!