wiki:TracWikiReplacements

Replacement wiki instances now online

Introduction

Our Trac instance is pretty horribly outdated (January 2024). It is only used for its Wiki as everything else has already been replaced. This article covers the pros and cons of many wikis that could be used as a replacement.

The starting points for this research:

Requirements

  • Must be open source
  • There must be a self-hosted option
  • SaaS is ok
  • LDAP auth is optional

General observations

  • Most Wikis are developed by one person with generally small contributions from other developers
  • Spam filtering
    • Can be built-in or plugin-based
    • In general seems pretty weak: Trac's Bayesian spam filter is actually pretty top-notch in this regard
    • Separation of user registration (Pwm) from the application (wiki) itself probably stops most spambots, but won't help against human spammers
    • Many Wikis depend completely ​Akismet for spam filtering
  • There are plenty of "semi up-to-date" Wikis out there, but only a handful of really promising options

Open source wikis that seem most suitable

Other possibly suitable open source wikis

  • ​Gollum
    • Stores wikis as Git repos
    • Support for logging in as a user relies on Git repository's authentication by default
    • Authenticating from elsewhere (LDAP?) can be implemented with some effort
    • It should be able to use Wiki repos from GitHub and GitLab
    • Seems fairly popular
    • One core developer plus small contributions from a fair amount of developers (see ​here)
  • ​Bluespice
    • Productized enterpriseishy distribution of Mediawiki with lots of additional (open source) plugins
    • Seems quite popular
  • ​FOSWiki
    • Written in Perl
    • Fairly large community
    • Seems to have a lively development community with many subprojects
    • A fork of TWiki from ~2008
    • Git repo: ​https://github.com/foswiki
    • Has LDAP support
    • Seems to have commercial support available
  • ​Docuwiki
  • ​MoinMoin
    • Written on Python
    • Mainly developed by one person
    • Fairly large community
    • LDAP and OIDC support built-in (see ​here)
    • Looks somewhat outdated from bling bling perspective
    • Spam filtering is not particularly top-notch, given the "news" items on MoinMoin? site
  • ​JSPWiki

Unsuitable alternatives that were reviewed

Open source wikis with wrong focus

  • ​Pukiwiki
    • Japanese only, which is a blocker-ish at minimum
  • ​Tiki Wiki CMS
    • CMS framework, not a wiki
  • ​PMwiki
    • "A wiki-based content-management system (CMS) for collaborative creation and maintenance of websites"
  • ​Bookstack
    • Written in PHP + Laravel
    • Mainly developed by one person
    • Project seems lively and has a fair amount of sponsors
    • Opinionated
      • "BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information."
      • In practice it seems to focus on "books" rather than "pages"
    • Public demo is available ​here
      • There are no plans to expand the scope of the platform
  • ​TiddlyWiki
    • Personal wiki, not for collaboration
  • ​Zim
    • Desktop wiki -> Not for collaborative editing

Non-open source wikis

Open source wikis that are outdated

  • ​TWiki
    • Feature-vise TWiki looks pretty cool
    • However, "TWiki is a cgi-bin script written in Perl. It reads a text file, hyperlinks it and converts it to HTML on the fly.", which is slightly worrying
    • Forked as FOSWiki, so questionable as an open source project
  • ​PHPWiki
    • Seems a tad old-school (uses SVN etc)
    • Does support recent PHP 8.x, so not outdated per se
  • ​UseMod
    • Written in Perl
    • Looks quite outdated from bling bling perspective
  • ​Ikiwiki
    • Seems outdated
  • ​Erfurtwiki
    • Not maintained anymore (since ~2015)
Last modified 3 months ago Last modified on 02/07/24 12:19:26