[Web4lib] Drupal and wikis

[John Fereira]

At 10:51 AM 6/11/2007, Chris Gray wrote:
>Wikis were originally designed to allow people to edit or add to a 
>Web site using simple plain text directly through their browser. It 
>provides some automatic full text indexing and fairly automatic 
>managing of links. Access is through following links or full text 
>search. The organization is basically hyper-textual or web-like and 
>not hierarchical with a navigation scheme. The Wiki look is basic 
>html without many of the visual features we now associate with the 
>Web. Forms and tables are not supported. Although images can usually 
>be included the emphasis is on text.

Not all wikis are the same.  I've been using the Atlassian Confluence 
project  for a couple of years and it does support a hierarchical 
navigation scheme and tables.  Table support is rudimentary out of 
the box but there are third party plugins that support tables much 
better.   I've been actively involved as a developer on open source 
projects for five years or so and Confluence has become the wiki of 
choice for virtually every project I've encountered 
recently.  Although it is a commercial product they have a free 
license for open source projects as well as a free license for their 
issue tracking system (Jira).   If you go to issues.apache.org you'll 
see that the Apache Software Foundation is using Jira.  Codehaus.org 
is using confluence to document all of the open source projects under 
their umbrella.   I wouldn't use a wiki to develop an institutional 
web presence but they've certainly evolved from a system which allows 
text entry through a browser to create web based content.




John Fereira
jaf30 at cornell.edu
Ithaca, NY