My Technology Blog

Mediawiki Review

After trying Zope, Plone, and Drupal, I moved on to Mediawiki. The main reason that I selected Mediawiki, was because I am a huge fan of Wikipedia. Another reason, was because one of the first sites that I saw with a nice implementation of Google Maps was based on Mediawiki.

The thing that I really like about Mediawiki is that it is great for an open web site. This is a web site where both registered, and non registered users can add and modify pages easily. Since Wikipedia is based on this free for all concept, there is a large amount of support built in to deal with bad users, and spam.

Installing Mediawiki was very similar to the typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation used by Drupal. It was pretty easy to create new pages, and then to copy and past examples from MediaWiki to try different page formats. I also started playing with the Portals, and was able to create some pretty nice pages, which were of course very similar to Wikipedia. It is surprising how much you can do with Portals and wiki formatting, and you can automate the page creation to a certain extent, and keep a consistent look and feel to a portal.

The similarity to Mediawiki, also turned out to be the main limitation for me. At a certain point in time, I decided that I wanted a new theme for the site, and I had to start modifying the skins. There realy doesn’t seem to be a large selection of skins available, and moving away from the Wikipedia look means lots of changes to the skins.

Pros:

• Great for an open web site.
• Very easy to add and create content if you are familiar with Wiki format.
• You can copy lots of examples from Wikipedia.
• Lots of checks for unregistered users.

Cons:

• Hard to get away from that Wikipedia theme.
• The wiki formatting scares away regular users.
• As the site grows, more time is required to monitor for bad behaviour.

Background

I have been playing around with different web server software solutions for the past year and a half, and using these packages to create different types of web sites. I have been working with a few people that are trying to do serious work, but it is mostly a hobby. I have not previously invested a large amount of time in any of these solutions, which allows me to be more unbiased, and I am looking at it from from a typical users point of view.

Initially when I started out, I really wanted to pick one very powerful CMS, and then use it for every web site. If there is one thing that I have learned through this whole exercise, is that this is clearly not the way to go. I will get into some of the reasons in a later postings, but a good analogy to why this is not a good idea, would be building an aircraft carrier to go water skiing. It might be possible, and you could do lots of other things too, but it is not very practical.

I am definitely a technology geek, and I even have a Ham Radio license to prove it. I have worked in hi tech my entire professional career, which is still not enough, and when I come home after work I do things like build build web servers (like this one) for fun.

Technology is definitely an addiction, and I am glad that I have something like Linux now (which is free), to give me a perpetual new technolgy fix. Whenever I try a cool new feature of Linux, or download a new distribution, I get that feeling of anticipation; like a kid opening a gift Christmas morning. Linux is also great since it is always changing, and improving, and there seems to be no end to the number of applications supported. Try to think of a problem to solve, and then try to find an existing Linux solution to resolve the problem. You will be surprised at how much is available.

Of course, getting it to work is another story, but I will talk about that later.