Ari Oinas wrote:

...

Thanks for your feedback. I would be glad to know a bit more about what you were looking for, which wikis you tried and what made you choose XWiki rather than another system. This would help us understand better what makes XWiki stand out and what it lacks compared with other platforms. If you've got a little time, do you think you could tell us a bit about that? Many thanks in advance, Guillaume

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

The XmpRpcProxy page was created after you sent your first mail. I published that page, as a result of your mail, so that it potentially helps you. As you can see the notes in the page, it is only a draft. When completed(fully maps the xml-rpc model&api) it will be linked/added to the platform page.

- 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@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users