[gnhlug-announce] CentraLUG: good news, bad news

[Morbus Iff]

 >Good news: Fantastic meeting scheduled for next monday - Gaim,
 >Firebird, TWiki, and the Centralug portal. Look out for a record.

I'm not a fan of TWiki myself:

  * it lacks the wiki simplicity: the extra complication is
    mostly not worth it (adding meta-fields is certainly
    nice, but see below; on the other hand, plugins are very
    easy to build), and ultimately, it can be viewed (I'm one
    of them) as an "affront" to the simplicity that a wiki
    is supposed to entail (if the community is fiddling with
    features and not content, that's a problem).

  * it takes a lot of processing power. in stress-testing
    TWiki, I felt like I couldn't run a heavy one on a shared
    server. likewise, support for mod_perl is claimed, but
    there are too many gotcha's - I ended up giving up.

  * lack of updates. there hasn't been an updates in a year,
    and the CVS versions don't show much difference from the
    release version, save for the typical bugfixes/security.

  * there's internal strife. I already know of one fork of
    the TWiki code (which has it's own set of problems,
    including a *more* difficult install, and a few security
    related issues; I can't, unfortunately, remember it's
    name), and the feeling that the lead developer just
    shoots features down because they're too difficult,
    against his desires for the product, etc., etc.

I ended up choosing Kwiki for my implementations:

    http://www.kwiki.org/
    http://disobey.com/noos/LibDB/

It's far, far simpler, and I've been very happy with it.
It does, however, have some gotchas (as does everything):

  * it hasn't been updated for a few months, largely because
    the guy who has developed it is a "known", and always busy.

  * it's still "new" so, although plugins are possible,
    the API is likely to change in the next release.

  * it requires a shell to install, but ultimately, once
    you've installed one, you can install a zillion more
    just by copying that directory to another location (in
    fact, if the Kwiki modules are installed on the server,
    you can just install a Kwiki instance on your own box,
    then FTP that instance to the server, and it'd work).




-- 
Morbus Iff ( i put the demon back in codemonkey )
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
Spidering Hacks: http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005776/disobeycom
icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus