[Discuss] Opinions needed: wiki software

[Rich Pieri]

On Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:48:15 -0400
Bill Horne <bill at horne.net> wrote:

> I guess some more info won't hurt: the site is
> http://www.big-8.org/ . It is hosted on a server

Okay. I see why "throw a wiki at it" was considered viable. It's not
the worst thing that I've seen done with a wiki. But I still wouldn't
use a wiki for this.

I see four viable options. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and static HTML.

WordPress is designed with bloggers in mind. Big 8 isn't a blog. You
can make WordPress do what you want, but then you're forcing a blogging
tool to be a general content management tool. On the other hand, it's
the simplest of the three CMS packages to set up and use and it can do
what you want. And you have experience with it. That's a plus.

Drupal is the 800 pound gorilla. It's big, beastly, does pretty much
everything one could ever want out of a CMS. It will do what you need
but there will be a learning curve to get there and you're going to
need someone technical to manage the system.

Joomla is wants to be the easy to use, pointilly-clickty CMS. It's a
lot simpler to use than Drupal but at the same time it's harder to make
it do precisely $foo. Like Drupal, you'll want to have a technical
admin to manage the thing.

Static HTML is the bare-bones solution. Install Apache and Git. Pick an
open source HTML editor like Aptana or Bluefish. Load up your HTML
files and wrap them in Git for revision and access control. Call it a
day.

My recommendation at this point is static HTML and Git. Seriously. The
site isn't growing. It's a mostly static collection of Usenet reference
material. You don't need most of what the other three packages can do
and you don't need the overhead that they entail. Static HTML + Git is
simple, it's secure, it's portable, and it is very light on system
resources.

Rather than export/import, I would start with a clean slate. For each
page in the wiki to copy over, do a copy-paste from the text in my
web browser to my editor. Do whatever fixup is necessary, save, commit
the changes, push the Git replica up to the server, and test.

-- 
Rich P.