Fun with TikiWiki
Martin has been setting up TikiWiki CMS/Groupware for a client
Follow @infoworldI just spent about four days setting up TikiWiki CMS/Groupware for a client. It has been interesting, to say the least.
This came about when I proposed creating a wiki of tutorial material for the client (a software publisher) for an upcoming product, rather than write a tutorial book about the product and have it be in print just in time for the next version to come out. The rest of the idea is that we'll take snapshots of all or part of the wiki at appropriate times and turn them into quick-print books and/or CDs, to pay for the development.
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O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley have been publishing a number of books that started as wikis, so there's precedent for something like this. For that matter, Randall Munroe is (gasp!) turning xkcd into a book. After I proposed writing my material in wiki format, the idea grew, and now we're also putting the actual product documentation on the wiki. There are about 8,000 existing pages of documentation in HTML format, and there will probably be hundreds new pages for the latest documentation updates, in addition to the tutorials I'll write. I'm planning to import all of the existing material into the wiki database so that it can be indexed for full-text search.
I did a search for wiki software and decided that MediaWiki, the software used for Wikipedia, would serve our purposes. The only deficiencies I could see in MediaWiki for our purposes are that it lacks Access Control Lists and content staging, but I thought we could manage without those given the strong API support.
