So a confluence of factors led to a Geek Day at Doyce’s with him and me and Randy (with Margie patiently hovering in the wings and patting us on the head when things went flooey).
One of my tasks for the day was getting a decent Wiki system that was a bit more robust that phpWiki that Doyce was already using. The main thing I was looking for was something with access controls to keep certain pages form being visible or accessible by certain users. If I got that working, I could put a lot of my game campaign stuff up there, as could Margie.
We pursued (read: “spent a hell of a lot of time downloading and banging our heads over arcane configurations, chmodding, chowning, Apache tweaking, Python noodging, and other unproductive pursuits”) a couple of systems: MoinMoin and TWiki. Both are, I’m sure, fine systems for folks who know what the hell they’re doing. Being less than a guru at such things, they were not our cuppa.
And while I was banging my head over various directory configurations and the like, Doyce casually looked up “easy Wikis” and discovered PmWiki, which downloaded easily, installed in three trivial steps, and appears to be fully-functioned and excellently-documented.
Just what I need — another time sink … 🙂
UPDATE: Doyce weighs on in the day.
I did not have a lot of luck installing TWiki. I feel like writing that on the blackboard 50 times. [shakes head] PhpWiki works for the AmberLinks, but I want something a little more controlled for the PBeM I’m running. I’ll take another look at PmWiki.
Twiki looked like it would work great if you either owned your own server, or had complete control and understanding of what you needed in order to do so.
MoinMoin was a bit more straightforward, but had the least-friendly installation instructions if you’re a “download, unzip, upload, configure” sort of guy; the directions were all in terms of shell console commands. Eep!
And in both of them, the issue of relative directories (from the server root? the account root? the public_html root?) was never clearly spelled out.
PmWiki was a 3 minute install, from download to running, assuming you have an FTP client that can do a 4-digit chown (like SmartFTP — which the instructions tell you about). And as far as I can see, it has about fifty times the features I need (though Doyce has found at least one minor (to me) shortcoming).
I think Wikis have a lot of potential for PBEMs. Next time I do one (hah!), I’ll make heavy use of it.
It’s ALIVE!!!
Thanks for the heads-up. Now comes all the moving of information, but so far, so good. Very happy with it right now.
Cool.
I’m pretty happy with it so far, too.