German Engineering
World Affairs on Sunday
For some time now I have been keeping track of my business affairs on a Zoho wiki. It’s a great tool, and it allows me to check procedures and update my “scribble pad” from any computer that has internet access. At least that was true until last weekend. I was planning to do some work on the Wiki last Sunday morning (when things are quiet and there are no distractions) and unfortunately, Zoho had the same idea at the same time. The wiki engine was unavailable for 3 hours. Both my wikis (I also use another Zoho wiki for keeping track of some private matters) were down.
And that scheduled maintenance time made me think. I have a back up of everything on Zoho, but it’s not much use without the engine. What I really need is my own wiki under my own control. Don’t get me wrong, Zoho is great, it has whistles and bells that beat the competition, but they do fiddle around with fine tuning a lot. I just get used to one way of doing something and then it changes.
So the time has come to settle for a simpler offering from a smaller competitor. I have spent hours today working on this and here’s what I have learnt. There are 5 free products on the market which fit my criteria for:
PHP scripts - TXT or MYSQL backend - Access control
- Bitweaver - more than just a wiki - a bit too big and complex to be honest
- TikiWiki - site unavailable due to a “major revision”
- Wikiwig - childish GUI - just didn’t look right
- WackoWiki - great potential , but failed at the final installation step - “must be a wikiname” is not explained and I tried everything!
- Dokuwiki - it’s simple, it’s effective and it works.
Now, I actually tried out Dokuwiki first, on one of my redundant web sites, and I did not like the syntax that I had to use, especially for tables. So I persevered with the others on my shortlist. All five wikis have had an equal chance, and I decided to implement access controlled wikis from Dokuwiki on two sites - one for business and one for private affairs. And guess what, Dokuwiki comes from Germany. As do many of the reliable goods and services that I buy!
And now that I have my own wiki engine, it will not change, so I will get used to the syntax. It will reside on my web servers, so it won’t go down (at least not for 3 hours in a row) and it is fully under my control. Given those advantages I can learn to live with a missing whistle or missing bell and some new syntax! Sorry Zoho!
Proactive Paul The Proactive Accountant Dot Com
Tags: #worldsun, developer, Germany, India, Russia, software, USA, wiki, Zoho
