Wiki Evalution for Pulgroup

(or: getting away from the evil elog ...)

Motivation and overview

There are various well-known problems with our current pulgroup pages http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/pulgroup/ so that looking to move to a new system has been identified (and agreed upon) to be timely and important.

There are basically two choices:

1. Use the MoinMoin wiki that has already been set up at UWM, which is currently used by the CBC group http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/ligovirgo/cbcnote
2. use a different wiki if we find a better one and the advantages are sufficiently great

Ok, so a little survey of suitable wiki-solutions was performed, guided by the following requirements:

• FreeSoftware: OSS/GPL based
• Code maturity
• Active development
• Active support, large user community
• Page Permissions
• Access Control Lists: read+write restrictions
• Media Revisions

Using the comprehensive wiki-comparison tool http://www.wikimatrix.org/ with these criteria has eventually brought forward two alternatives: TWiki and TikiWiki, so our total field of contenders is now:

• TWiki: http://twiki.org/
• MoinMoin: http://moinmo.in/
• TikiWiki: http://info.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php

Comparison between MoinMoin, TikiWiki and TWiki

A comprehensive side-by-side comparison of features can be obtained from the wikimatrix following this link: http://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/MoinMoin+TikiWiki-CMS-Groupware+TWiki

All three look very strong, but there a few points to highlight:

• Media Revisions are not supported in MoinMoin, i.e. uploading new versions of pdfs, figures, etc overwrites the old ones, no history/revision tracking. Both TikiWiki and TWiki support this.
• HTML tags: TikiWiki only supports 'some' HTML tags, while TWiki understands all of them, MoinMoin apparently too using a plugin
• WYSIWYG editing is supported in MoinMoin and TWiki, but only partially in TikiWiki
• Math Typeset seems to be supported by all 3 to various degrees via plugins
• TWiki supports so called "sub webs" which let you structure a usually flat wiki in a hierarchical fashion (very helpful to support more than one group/project in one wiki!)

Detailed notes:

TWiki

• Local playground: https://n0.aei.uni-hannover.de/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Sandbox/TWikiTesting4Pulgroup (Username = PulGroup, PW = pulgrouptest)
• Great Math/!LaTex support
• Big Users: CERN (https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/DefaultWeb/WebHome), IBM(internal), Motorola(internal), Lufthansa and lots of other big companies (mostly internal), huge total number of installations: http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/TWikiInstallation

MoinMoin

• official playground: http://moinmo.in/WikiSandBox
• Pro: already used by CBC group
• Cons: no history/revision tracking of uploaded content (images, pdfs, ...), no 'official' full-blown LaTeX/math support
• Big Users: mostly Software-projects: Apache (http://wiki.apache.org/general/), Debian (http://wiki.debian.org/), Fedora (http://wiki.debian.org/), Xen (http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/FrontPage)
• LaTeX/Math support not mentioned on their webpage, "private" extension seems to exist (http://johannes.sipsolutions.net/Projects/new-moinmoin-latex)

TikiWiki

• Local playground: https://n0.aei.uni-hannover.de/tiki/tiki-index.php (Username = PulGroup, PW = pulgrouptest)
• not just a wiki but a 'content management system' (CMS), including Forums, Blogs, Articles, Image Gallery, Calendars and Events, Database tracking system, File and Image Galleries, User and Group Management, Surveys, Quizes, and Polls, Activity-based Workflow Engine. This can be positive or negative, need to try it out ....
• Big Users: KDE wiki (http://wiki.kde.org/), Mozilla support (http://support.mozilla.com), plus some minor ones (http://info.tikiwiki.org/tiki-browse_gallery.php?galleryId=1)

Poll on favorite choice for group web-pages

A doodle poll on the above choices has been launched: http://www.doodle.ch/participation.html?pollId=3ri4bsseban43zbg

The unanimous (so far) candidate seems to be: TWiki