Re: [xwiki-users] Why I chose Xwiki instead of other wikis

Ok, here's a small list of reasons why I chose Xwiki and not some other wiki. Before I begun searching for suitable wiki, I gathered a list of requirements that a wiki must have. Wikis that I tested or studied were: MediaWiki, TikiWiki, Xwiki and Confluence. Maybe some others too, but I don't remember ;) Here is that list and how different wikis fulfill those requirements: Requirement 1: Ability to transclude pages and sections of pages in other pages MediaWiki: Yes, support page transcluding natively and section transcluding can be added with plugin Xwiki: Supports page transcluding. Section macro was easy to do, and I got to do it just the way I like it :) Confluence: I think it supports transcluding. Not tested it though. Requirement 2: Support for hierarchical information ( tree-like ) MediaWiki: Very bad. Can be achieved using categories, but because Category is a namespace, category names must be unique which was unacceptable in mycase. Xwiki: Very flexible. Namespaces ( Spaces in Xwiki ) are easy to create and pages can be ordered hierarchically using page's parent -field. Requirement 3: Support for content localization/translation Mediawiki: None. AFAIK every language needs it's own Wiki. Xwiki: Built-in. Creating translated content is easy. Functions to retrieve translations still needs work, but are good enough to get the job done. Requirement 4: Flexible, easy to maintain user rights Mediawiki: User right management very restricted. Better with plugins but still poor. Xwiki: Superb! Very easy, yet powerful way to handle user rights. I really liked that user right has 3 options: allow, deny, neutral. This combined with user groups and spaces makes user rights management very enjoyable. TikiWiki: Frustratingly detailed. Has some very powerful features, but list of about 100 different user right parameters is very frustrating. (This opinion is based on very quick tests) Requirement 5: Ability make offline HTML dumps of wiki content MediaWiki: Possible (maybe with a plug-in, I don't remember) Xwiki: Supported natively. Yet, I decided to make my own XML Dump program which fetches content through XML/RPC interface. And now a list of pros and cons for every wiki I tested: Mediawiki: + Widely used, lots of help available + lots of plugins - hierarchical information support very bad - user right management limited and hard to comprehend TikiWiki: + Lots of features - User interface looks clumsy and is difficult to use ( maybe because I tested Xwiki just before this ;) - User rights management is overwhelming Confluence: ( not tested, opinions based on what I read about it) + seems finalized + used widely in enterprises and universities + XML/RPC interface - PRICE Xwiki: + Very slick UI + Macros / Programming capabilities + XML/RPC interface + User rights management + customer support - Seems in many ways incomplete/work in progress - Documention is scattered across the internets / help is very hard to find using Google. Most searches end up in Xwiki JIRA-pages. - Xwiki documentation pages seem disorientating. Even if I know theres some useful info there, it takes me 15mins to find it. (DevGuide, dev.xwiki.org, xwiki.org/Features) - Example: http://xoffice.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/CodeBase/XmlRpcProxy and http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Features/XMLRPC, so similar, yet in totally different places

- Scandinavian characters in pageIds don't seem to work I hope these lists are helpful to you. Despite some criticism I presented here, you have developed an amazing wiki. I think you should focus a little more on making documentation easy to find and read even for someone who is just starting to code or otherwise noob (such as me ;). Now it gives an impression that you have to be Linux-expert/super-coder/uber-nerd to be able to set up wiki and program it (which you don't need to be, it's actually quite simple). Best regards, Ari _______________________________________________ users mailing list users(a)xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users