Sunday, February 10th, 2008

Wikka Wakka Wiki

Over the last couple of days I have mainly been playing with WikkaWiki, a flexible, standards-compliant and lightweight wiki engine written in PHP. I've toyed with the idea of creating a personal wiki for sometime, but, I've been reluctant to start one for fear of it becoming just another thing to update and maintain. Anyhow, I now seem to have conquered this fear and I've created my first wiki.

Now, being a new wiki it naturally doesn't contain much of any content, but, at this moment that's not too important, the important thing is that I've started it, the content will come later. I'm planning on using the wiki to document my Ubuntu/CrunchBang Linux projects. I'll also be using it to privide supporting supporting material for my blog. For example, stuff like this crontab howto, and these GIMP brushes would be better suited to the wiki.

Regarding the WikkaWiki software, it's quite impressive and fairly easy to work with. I looked at several other PHP based wiki projects, but IMHO WikkaWiki was the best — apart from maybe MediaWiki, but then I considered that to be overkill for my needs. If you're starting a new wiki then I'd certainly recommend at least looking into the possibility of using WikkaWiki. It has many great features, some that I noticed include:

  • a super easy installation process
  • a nice default design and easy to customise CSS
  • code base is very hackable, including actions/plugins
  • RSS feeds for recently updated content, comments etc
  • syntax highlighting of published code, courtesy of the GeSHi plugin
  • it's super scary fast

All-in-all WikkaWiki has impressed me a lot; besides, if it's good enough for Puppy Linux, it's good enough for me ;)

Tagged with: php, software, ubuntu, wiki


6 Responses to “Wikka Wakka Wiki”

  1. Sikon wrote,

    Why overkill? MediaWiki is the sanest wiki software out there. All the other wikis I've seen are still stuck in the 1990s, when CamelCase was still considered acceptable.

  2. Seiti wrote,

    I'm a happy user of WikkaWiki too. The best feature is the small, understandable and hackable base code. =)

  3. Joe Smith wrote,

    I've been meaning to set up a wiki for a while, but have put off looking at which platform to use. I'll give WikkaWiki a shot for sure.

  4. DarTar wrote,

    Hi Philip,

    just a small note to let you know that the latest Wikka release (1.1.6.4) is finally available with several enhancements and new features - http://docs.wikkawiki.org/WhatsNew1164 Upgrading from previous versions via the web wizard should take you just a few minutes.

    Sikon, FYI Wikka supports (but doesn't require) CamelCase linking ;)

  5. Philip wrote,

    @DarTar: Thank you for the update, I'll check out the latest release.

  6. DarTar wrote,

    Oops, I just realised your wiki runs on trunk, in that case it doesn't make much sense to downgrade to 1.1.6.4, better wait for trunk-based 1.1.7 release which will include all 1.1.6.4 enhancements.

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