More on the Work Wiki Quest

Posted on April 25, 2006 One Comment

Had the chance today to spend some time looking over the various Wiki offerings that would run easily in our office windows-centric environment. And frankly, while there’s no doubt been a lot of effort put into some of the offerings… I just wasn’t overly excited by what I was seeing. Not that they’re all bad, mind you! In fact, one I found today I liked quite a bit: FlexWiki. I struggled a bit with the markup options, but it seemed like it would work.

Then I remembered how easy it really is to drop a full WAMP environment onto a windows server via XAMPP or Wampserver. Both of those work quite well and both make it very easy to get a wamp environment up and going without worrying about messing up any other services (note to self, remember to assign apache to a different port!). So, I tossed XAMPP onto my workstation and went and grabbed the big dog: MediaWiki (it powers Wikipedia).

Installation was a total breeze. Unpacked the archive, dropped it in the htdocs/wiki directory and browsed to http://localhost/wiki. From there it had a link suggesting that perhaps I should install it. Ok, easy enough. Clicked the link, it checked over the environment and blessed it and proceeded to prompt me for some configuration info. Gave it the info, turned it loose and in under 2 minutes had a working wiki running! 5 minutes later I had a handful of pages mocked up and I think this will work just fine for us.

Now to figure out how to properly organize all of our development data. That’ll be a lot harder, I think, than installing the wiki. But finally, a centralized place to dump all of our bits and pieces of documentation, design sketches and helpful email tips that we send out from time to time. No more losing stuff!

Tags: mediaWiki, wiki, work