the eXternal mind

Argggg! I just spent the last 3 hours looking around for a good wiki system to use for Avery’s new web site. I was daring and wanted to try Instiki, a beautiful ruby based wiki. I was trying to set up fcgid with apache2, but that didn’t work out very well. So then I decided to ditch apache and go with lighttpd instead. But then lighttpd became a pain, and since it didn’t integrate well with subversion, I decided to go back to apache and set up a proxy to seamlessly pass the urls to Ruby’s WEBrick server (the default one). That worked well except that Instiki insisted on having a directory after the base path of the url (ex. test.com/someword/show/HomePage when I wanted test.com/show/HomePage). So I decided not to use it.

So I then went back to looking around for good php wikis and was dismayed at how crappy all of the current ones are. MediaWiki is too bloated. DokuWiki can’t use MySQL so it doesn’t scale up for larger sites. WikkaWiki is good, but the development on it isn’t very active (edit: The project is active, but just has slow release cycles), and in my previous experience, it takes some work to skin. Other wiki’s were too bloated, visually unappealing, or forced linking with WikiWords. I was thinking to myself: “Gah! Is it really *that* difficult to make a php wiki with these features: [insert what I was thinking here]?!” I really wanted to start coding one, but decided not to since I still had lots of work to do.

Erg, it’s really frustrating though. Now I don’t really have a good solution except for maybe falling back on a Wordpress CMS, but that goes against my idea of a wiki.