I need to document a lot of things both personally and at work. I’ve always just created static documents or web pages and just made them available to others. It works, it may not be elegant, but it works 
I’ve just downloaded 2 VMware appliances, one includes Twiki, and the other MediaWiki (of wikipedia fame). I’m going to take some time to evaluate both (yeah I know I’m supposed to be reading about LVM, this is in addition to). I’m going to document what I learn about LVM in my Wikis and see which “feels right” to me.
I’ve already started using Twiki, I don’t find it difficult, the shorthand is easy enough to learn, but I have nothing to compare it to. Hence the download of MediaWiki. I can muck it up, see what I like, which package I prefer, and then see about installing my own wiki and migrating my work over. Should be a nice learning experience.
This is just another killer use for VMware appliances. Just start the VMs up, play and delete. No muss, no fuss. Love that!
You can download the Twiki appliance from http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev.TWikiVMDebianStable
You can download the MediaWiki appliance from http://www.rpath.org/rbuilder/project/vehera-base/
March 27th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
I’ve used both Twiki and MediaWiki. I ended up opting for MediaWiki because (believe it or not) the Twiki VM looked like hell. I don’t mean there was anything wrong with it, just that there was a lot of sample data and example pages and I just didn’t have enough time that day to remove it all AND learn how to set up user accounts and permissions.
We’ve been running MediaWiki on a couple of sites for a few months now and it’s pretty good. The two things I don’t like about it is that it’s fairly slow compared to other wikis I’ve used (to be expected since it’s a big pig of a wiki) and much of the configuration and customization has to be done by hacking the config files. I was surprised at that – I had thought that since MediaWiki was so big and bad that it would have more of a configuration GUI.
My 0.02.