[wiki-research] Wiki vs CMS

[kjettil]

I'm a new subscriber to the list, so I didn't read this thread
until today. Here some comments to Peter's original message:


>I'm meaning to use a wiki as a form of content management system.

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I had the need for a CMS solution. I started by reviewing Joomla, 
Drupal, Xoops and quite a few other solutions. None pleased me really. 
They were too heavy, had expensive ($$) additions to get the necessary 
functionality, not stable, etc aso. 

I ended up choosing a wiki solution, viz. PmWiki. 
I've never regretted my choice.
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>I realise that a wiki is not intended to be a CMS and making it one could 
>compromise the essential simplicity and light-weight nature of a wiki."

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In my experience, the simplicity and light-weight nature of PmWiki is not 
at all compromised when used as a CMS. But you gain a lot of versatility, 
compared to the abovementioned CMS solutions.
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>Is much work being done on distributed wikis? I'll be doing some
>collaboration with other people. The easy, but clumsy, solution would
>be to have a wiki for each collaboration. I'd rather, though, have one
>wiki on my system that I can divide into domains and share each one
>with a different selection of content for different groups. Members of
>the groups would do the same, so no wiki would be the same as any
>other. I'd see the content being supplied on-demand, rather than
>synchronised, unless a priority item (like the index, of course). RSS
>seems to be a good mechanism to allow this.

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A PmWiki site can be made "distributed" in two ways.

(1) by organizing the contents in Groups, e.g with only Members of a 
Group having access to the contents of that Group.

(2) by applying PmWiki's "farm" structure, i.e keeping the script 
core separate and having any number of uniquely designed, administered 
and maintained sites. Updating the core, e.g with added functionality, 
is then reflected in the functionality of all sites.

PmWiki supports RSS.
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>Similar to the above, as in a real CMS, I'd like to keep status
>labels on end documents (when updated, expired, sensitive, public,
>encrypted, local, distributed, etc. etc.). To be useful, this would
>need to be easily configurable to numbers of different sorts of status
>- and the rules would need to be easy to write and portable. XML seems
>a good model to underlie this. You may imagine (and it may indeed be),
>ridiculous to load these on a current wiki, but, from another point of
>view, it is just an extension of current housekeeping that checks that
>two people aren't maintaining the same page.

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PmWiki has powerful seach and page listing facilities.
What you are asking for is presently being implemented, under beta 
testing  - will likely be in the core shortly. By giving each document
a status label, you'll e.g be able to sort documents based on such labels.

PmWiki can already handle simultaneous edits.
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PmWiki can be downloaded from http://www.pmwiki.org
You'll be fascinated by what you can do with PmWiki.
Beware of addiction, though!

//kjettil