I am trying to set up a wiki/management system for a software project and keep getting confused by the myriad of options available.
I have seen TWiki and Plone before, which bill themselves as enterprise level components. Would they be better to use than something like, say, MediaWiki?
What are some other suggestions for wiki/management software?
You really can't beat Confluence, especially for $10 (for 10 or fewer users). We use it at my job and it is really fantastic. The organization takes a little getting used to, though.
I've found the MediaWiki wiki to be very flexible and useful.
As a bonus, it's very familiar to anyone who's used Wikipedia.
Disclaimer: I work for Fog Creek
The FogBugz wiki is great because it's integrated with the rest of the app, but the editor is buggy. The good news is we're doing a major revamp.
I have one non-recommended Wiki : the one available for Sharepoint intranet sites. Utterly a pain to use.
I suggest ScrewTurn for wiki.
You can also take a look at AxoSoft OnTime which is very good software for bug tracking, scrum/agile project managment, dev wiki, help desk and more.
In case anyone's considering TWiki (the Wiki I was a developer on from 2000-2008), please remember to check out the fork - http://foswiki.org. We feel we were forced to fork when the TWiki trademark holder re-invented the project as 'commercial open source' and reduced our ability to determine how we would volunteer our time.
I setup an intranet site for disseminating research from and to technically savvy, but certainly not technically proficient crowd. I tried several solutions, and PMWiki is the best. Easy to administer, LOTS of "plugins," skins and extensions from the people using it, easy for less-technical folks to use and with a large base, it won't be abandoned anytime soon.
It was to setup an alternative to random emails or word docs on a file server. A "knowledge Management System." I found it much easier to use than TWiki.
We're using Assembla in the company I run. They provide unlimited code hosting (Git/SVN), ticketing, wiki, scrum and other useful tools, and doesn't cost much.
We tried most wiki packages over the years with little success. It was just tough getting enough traction to get the development and project teams to actually use one.
We struck gold after we had converted to Google Apps enterprise for email and calendar as it also comes with "Sites". It turns out Google Sites can work as a very flexible and easy to use wiki tool. Built in public/private/sharing stuff too so some sites can be public facing while others are internal (by Google Apps ID) only.
I like 37signals's Basecamp software. You get a great, inexpensive hosted solution with a lot of useful features.
I have been using redmine with my team. It is free and has a wiki that is more than adequate.
I like the CODE FORGE kind of applications, like Trac or Redmine, if you have some place to host it. Or Google Code / SourceForge for free hosted options if you don't mind doing your projects open source.
I had the same dilemma of which wiki to use for a dev project a few months ago. We went with Mindtouch due to the fact that it's free (Mindtouch Core), it has lots of great extensions, the design is modern and flexible, the file attachment and linking capabilities are comprehensive, and it can search through file content. The community and forums are also strong. We've been very happy with the choice.
I would choose Trac, which is perfect for software development since it combines Wiki with Issue Management and Version Control.
From their site,
Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission is to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team's established development process and policies.
So it is built for software development teams.
I think it depends on what your requirements are.
The absolute best and easiest to set up/use that I've seen is:
A wiki in a file. It uses JavaScript to do everything and works great!
XWiki is a professional wiki with enterprise features such as Blog, strong rights management, LDAP authentication, PDF export, full skining and more. It also includes an advanced Form and scripting engine making it a development environment for data-based applications. It has powerful extensibility features such as scripting in pages, plugins and a highly modular architecture. See the full feature list for more.
We are big fans of dokuWiki which is flexible, simple (no database but you can if you want) and have great features.
You should consider PBWiki which has a really great interface, is free for small projects, user-level access controll and more fun features. (Not to mention I've used it myself with great results.)
Almost more importantly than which software you choose is to make sure you understand what you're trying to do with the wiki. Without some overarching conscious structure a wiki easily becomes unusable. Also (though not as crucial), it makes sense to learn some about the behavior with wikis, because it is no silver bullet:
Then you may want to consider as an administrator what you are looking for in the wiki - there is significant difference in for example how scriptable they are, probably with twiki ending up on top (or confluence which I have little experience with). Also for example MediaWiki is completely adapted for mostly open environments, their ACL features are not that good. Another aspect is that these may be too heavy-weight and complex for what you want to do, and you should make do with a wiki like the one integrated with the trac ticketing system.
I championed a similar endeavor a while back and chose MoinMoin. It's free and very easy to set up and configure. I wound up managing several wiki instances with this engine - one for each of the different projects the development team was working on.
I'd suggest PmWiki. It's very simple and doesn't really hog on resources and uses files to store data. I got it up and running in about 20 minutes.