[Cialug] Wiki Task Tracking

[Josh More]

We use MediaWiki at Alliance and I use it at home to track my projects. 
It works well.

The only catch is what Matt pointed out - the structure of a wiki is not
mandatory.  Thus, you either have to let it evolve on its own (trust
your users) or build it first and hope that it stays in place (trust
your users).

Personally, I feel that the flexibility in MediaWiki more than makes up
for the fact that its organic growth makes structure difficult. 
However, larger/stricter organizations would be better off with a CMS.



-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP, GIAC 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701

>>> "Matthew Nuzum" <newz at bearfruit.org> 01/20/08 2:33 PM >>>
I've not used mediawiki much, instead my organization uses the python
based
moin moin. I've found it very easy to create plugins and modules and
have
done things like you've described. We have created a graphviz plugin so
that
it will show a graphviz chart in the page. Also we've created
"formatters"
which are plugins that modify the outputs of blocks of wiki markup
surrounded by {{{    }}}.

Some people in my company have created external packages for talking to
moin, for example "editmoin" available at <http://labix.org/editmoin>,
though I've seen or heard of other tools people have thrown together.

I have to ask, are you sure that a wiki is the right tool for the job? I
love the easy editing that a wiki provides, but for highly structured
content you start to loose the benefits of a wiki and you might gain by
using a CMS that provides a decent development platform.

I'm excited about the wave of rapid development tools out there (my
favorite
is Django but Ruby on Rails, Cake and Symphony are all in the same
boat). I
can whip out a complete web application in Django in 3 - 4 hours which
includes an admin interface and input validation. I get a real database
backend and my admin forms have helpful explanatory text next to each
form
field so people don't have to fuss with special wiki formatting or
markup.

I think its fun to hack on the wiki but as I move forward I'm solving
these
types of problems with simple web applications built with django.

On Jan 20, 2008 7:52 AM, Todd Walton <tdwalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> I want to set up a wiki that my team can use to track a variety of
things
> like:
>
> 1) System statuses ("Intranet is down" "database will be down
> Wednesday night" etc)
> 2) Employee availability ("Todd has PTO Tuesday, Jan 29")
> 3) Various notes ("if a client has problems with this app,
> such-and-such has been fixing it lately")
>
> I need the tool to be flexible and I want all team members to update
> it regularly.  Right now, that's all I know.  I've set up Mediawiki at
> home, and installed a calendar plugin.  That's pretty nifty.  I'll
> probably need a calendar for this work wiki, but I'm not sure about
> how I'm going to set this up.  I'm still mentally working on a
> pre-alpha architecture.  (Read: wtf am I doing?)  Anybody have any
> suggestions or anecdotes?
>
> -todd
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-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode