mdlbear | Collaboration environments (Reply)

This afternoon I had the opportunity to sit in on a technical presentation by Peter Thoeny of TWiki.net. Their product is an enterprise (i.e. supported) version of TWiki, a flat-file-based, structured wiki. Had some interesting conversations afterward.

TWiki is a good match for a lot of what I'm looking for in a collaboration environment: flat files, efficient, highly configurable, written in Perl... The support for forms and page templates is surperb. The latest version has a WYSIWYG editor, too, based on TinyMCE. On the other hand it doesn't match my existing directory structure or preferred version control system (it uses its own, based on RCS -- for excellent reasons, I might add, but RCS is lousy at handling large binary files, and I have lots of 'em). Ikiwiki's a better match for those, but has far fewer plugins and isn't so good at templating. Neither can handle publishing to multiple blog sites or compiling a frozen version onto CD or paper.

So I'm definitely going to deploy it internally -- it's a good enough database replacement to work for my minimal business bookkeeping and contact-management needs. It will make a good household phonebook, calendar, and message center, too. The page templates make it a shoe-in for the cookbook project, except that the WYSIWYG editor isn't in Debian or Ubuntu yet.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to evolve my own system aimed at mixed electronic and hard-copy media, multi-site publishing (including multi-platform blogging), and collaborative recording projects. While using it on my next album. Right. That one might very well start with Ikiwiki as it's web front-end.