Comments on: Wikis for quality manual projects?

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 10:39:54 +0000

Take a look at Blogtronix. They have ways of including rudimentary workflows for blog entries which could work, depending on who you are as a user. Five levels of ‘membership’ so you can really give the approvals process a good twist. What’s more, George is very helpful when it comes to mods.

You could use RSS so that different approvers can see updates through their feeds.

Have you thought about something like JotSpot? That has (had) a project management wiki so might be closer to what you’re thinking of in terms of document version control? But then you could use Blogtronix to provide a feedback to anyone who is commenting or editing. The net result is the same. It’s all in the configuration.

On balance, I’d take a good look at Blogtronix. They have some of the best of Joomla and Drupal munged together to deliver a pretty good ‘out the box’ experience.

Or…how about iUpload?. They can pull in feeds from all over the place, you just tell it what you want. It can wikify posts - that might be an answer. They too have sophisticated user control.

By: John Ward

John Ward — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 13:54:05 +0000

Check out drupal, its one of the best opensource CMS systems out there. You have to host it and it requires PHP + MySQL.

There’s a core system and more plugins than you can shake a stick at.

You can check it out in operation, along with a bunch of other open source CMS solutions.

John

By: Justin Mason

Justin Mason — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 17:39:23 +0000

I would suggest defining a document-approval workflow based on tags on the pages, or page categories. You don’t need to require the wiki software support it, when you can define social rules instead.

Ensure you mail page changes to a mailing list, so that you can review these approvals and revert any mistakes…

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 11:14:57 +0000

Thanks Keith - I’ll look into that.

Robin - I use Google Docs frequently for collaborating but is there an approvals process in it?

Jim - a wiki is online software which allows anyone to edit a document they are viewing - all through a browser. Wikipedia is the best known example and it defines a wiki here.

By: Jim

Jim — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 09:18:06 +0000

Excuse my ignorance, but just what is a Wikis?

By: Robin Blandford

Robin Blandford — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 09:02:24 +0000

I’d try a collaborating with Google Docs for something like that. It’s got pretty good revision history these days.

By: Keith Gaughan

Keith Gaughan — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 04:45:11 +0000

Docuwiki? That’s the closest I can think of.