Will no one help poor ogged with his TPS reports?
I've tried out TWiki (perl) and Mediawiki (PHP). TWiki was -way- complicated and (for instance) integrating it into the standard authentication system for all corporate websites was a pain. Add-ins were a pain. In general, Mediawiki was -muuch- nicer and easier. I run a mediawiki-based wiki for something remarkably like your need, and it's quite easy to admin and backup.
++mediawiki
--twiki
I like Pmwiki. We've been using it for a work project (two now, in fact) for several months. The installation is simple (especially as it doesn't need MySQL), it has lots of neat extensions and helpful documentation. You can give it a trial run with a local installation before you take it online, too, to see if you like it.
If you have support for Python, MoinMoin is another nice one.
We use MediaWiki at work, and it seems fine.
Our lab used PMWiki recently, for a cross-atlantic collaboration. That seemed to work pretty well (although that's mainly from a user's perspective, I didn't have much of a hand in setting it up).
I used PMWiki for a while. It's pretty easy to set up if you already have PHP installed on the server. The install process is: unpack the files, fiddle with the permissions until the web server will serve them (that's the hard part). You'll have to edit a few config files, but only, e.g., to change the Title Bar text, etc.
No matter what Wiki software you use, your users will have to learn some Wiki markup, which is roughly equivalent in complexity to presentation HTML. As a person who has no problem typing a little HTML for bold text, hyperlinks, and bullet lists, I find Wiki markup confusing (just because its different).
Because of the massive Wikipedia community, MediaWiki strikes me as better documented than any of the others. It's what I recommend people use at work.
Thanks, folks. MediaWiki and PMwiki were in fact what I was focusing on. The one thing I've heard about MediaWiki is that it uses more resources, even for small installations, than others. Not sure that matters...
I installed SocialText on our local server. It was a pretty big pain getting the huge list of perl modules installed, even through CPAN, and the version I installed was still a bit immature a.f.a. admin interfaces go, but it might have improved. (Their latest version is a lot prettier, anyway.) And it was pretty featureful and flexible. I wrote a perl extension to integrate it into our bug tracking system. (The bug tracking side of that was more complicated.) I haven't used any other wikis, so I can't really recommend SocialText above the others, but it's not a terrible option.
BTW, social text is free with source code.
We use a similar setup at work, but use stikipad, which is a hosted service. It's very slick -- if you've got the modest budget it requires, you might want to consider it. MediaWiki would probably be pretty easy to maintain, but in general I'm a big fan of using hosted solutions when possible.
in general I'm a big fan of using hosted solutions when possible
Really? What about concerns about privacy/confidentiality/reliability, etc? The hosted services are very slick, and don't require users to learn any markup, but....
BTW, social text is free with source code.
Yeah, but who's got the source code?
14: It's "open source", where the license might be OSI, but I'm not sure, so I hesitate to use the phrase.
I'd forgotten about the earlier post and totally thought this was going to be about an unfogged wiki, on which new procedures such as the use of presidential pseudonyms could be documented for people who sometimes don't read all the comments to every post. but then we wouldn't be able to tell n00bz to read all the archives. (a task which grows more herculean by the day.) also, Chet!
A cagey n00b might could bargain it down to "all the archives through OGGED HAS CANCER ZOMG, with a statistical sampling thereafter".
No. I renounce my heresy.
Too late, SB. Now it belongs to the ages.
There is nothing for me now.
I am dirt.
Just lie down on the ground and wait for death to overtake you.
Here I lie, waiting for death and looking at lolcats.