This page is dedicated to allowing folks to try out using a wiki as the "content management engine". You can take a look at the bare-bones page by clicking here, and you can even edit it by clicking on an edit link (although I'd prefer you went and edited the /SandBox instead).
What is wiki and why would I use it?
The original, best-known wiki is wikipedia, an online repository for information that could be edited by absolutely anyone viewing the pages. The idea (and it has worked quite well) is that by making a very low barrier to contributions and being entirely democratic about who can contribute, users will feel a natural urge to improve, structure, collaborate and in the end produce a body of work that is far greater than what any one person --- or indeed any formal grouping of people --- could have produced.
When persuading people to use a wiki as their website, the collaborative editing features and ingrained democracy are of little concern. The important thing is the barrier to use, which in many typical webhosting situations is quite high (you want to add more pictures to your website? OK, give me $20 and I'll do it --- or else you can figure out how to write HTML and use FTP, or fork out £1000 for Dreamweaver). With a wiki, changing the text on a page, adding and removing photos, and even changing the site structure are things you can do by just clicking a few times. As I said above, you can right now go and edit the SandBox. And you can attach documents and other files to a page, just by using the drop-down "actions" box (for example, the attachments action).
Editing can be done using a graphical editor, or you can just use the text editor, which requires you to know a little about wiki-language.
So what does it take to get a wiki?
- You need a webhosting service provider who allows you to run programs written in a language called Python.
- The installation is not terribly difficult --- it takes between 4 and 20 minutes to put the files onto the webserver, and then it takes me about 5 minutes more to bring a new site online.
- The site will have a default theme which is a pleasing blue colour --- but of course, you will probably want it to look more personalised. This is where you might incur some expense in having someone like me design the site for you.
The person setting up your site would define access control lists: who is allowed to create, write and delete pages. This can also be done on a per-page basis: although I'm the only person allowed to edit the rest of this website, I have permitted anyone to edit this page just by putting an instruction at the top (look for #acl All:read,write in the source for this page).
- That's it; you've got a website that you have total control over!
You will probably want more from your website than just putting text onto it - pictures, guest books, forums perhaps. The following subpages showcase some of the cool tricks you can do with MoinMoin wiki to make it behave like a normal website (not working quite right yet).