I was recently given a project to setup a new collaboration tool to be used by both the engineering department and sales and after some lengthy reading about the difference between offering something as a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) or a WOA (Web Oriented Architecture).  In the end a SOA system would have been too costly to implement so I went with a WOA that works on the principles of REST.  To this end I started scouring the web to see if there were any tools already available on the Internet that would fit the needs of the project and that is when I began thinking about using a wiki interface and seeing if I could make it do everything that is needed.  This started me looking at many different wiki’s on the web and originally I was just going to use MediaWiki but then I came across Mindtouch and their Deki Wiki.
When I first started looking at Deki Wiki I wasn’t sure it would be the right fit, especially since it comes from a corporate entity unlike MediaWiki which is an open source project.  But as I looked deeper into the features of Deki Wiki I began to see just how well it could suit our needs.  It has a very intuitive layout and is easy to operate and setup.  It is a free download off their site as either a ready to go VM or you can grab a tar ball of it and set it up on your favorite distro.  I grabbed the VM since it’ll be running on one of our ESX servers anyway, it was a larger download but worth it in the end.  From there I began playing with it and seeing just how well featured of a package it really is.  I have to say I was impressed by it.  The way it is setup to handle users and permissions is very nice, and it was point and click to personalize the wiki to the company here.
The biggest thing I was worried about was getting forms setup through the wiki.  Originally I was thinking about doing everything thru PHP forms but in the end I found this to be a little more encumbering then I wanted.  This prompted me to change tracks and look into setting up forms written in xhtml and then having them submit to a PHP script that would then handle the processing of the forms.  This greatly simplified the implementation of the forms in the wiki and with some simple planning I was able to setup the PHP script to handle any and all form data that could ever be sent to it.  Currently it just reformats the data in a simple text email and sends it out but I’m working on having it push the data into a SQL database that could then be accessed to view submitted forms.
I would also like to mention that the guys over at Mindtouch are very helpful and will send out an email inquiring how the install and setup went and if there is anything they can help you with.  It has been a pleasure working with them and their product and so far everyone here also has enjoyed using it (maybe a little too much since I keep getting new forms to add to it).
<a href=”http://wiki.mindtouch.com/” title=”Mindtouch”>Mindtouch’s Home Page</a>

Posted in Computer Science
3 Comments Posted by Mike