See WikiEngineReview and related pages (CategoryWikiEngineReview) for notes and discussion about these reviews and wikis in general.
General
- Date of Review: April 10, 2004
- WikiEngine and Version Reviewed: "PhpWiki 1.3.8"
- WikiEngine Author: Steve Wainstead, Jeff Dairiki, Reini Urban, Carsten Klapp and numerous more.
- Review Summary: Syntax quite conservative (similar to WardsWiki), layout themable (with some very ugly themes), lots of features, easy to install, but hard to maintain and upgrade.
- Review Quality: An assessment by the reviewer of how reliable this review is. Did the reviewer test every feature, rely on things he read, or make assumptions based on general knowledge of wikis? Is the reviewer counting on experienced users of the package to find and correct his errors or omissions, or does he believe that he has done enough research and testing to be 99% sure of the facts?
- Standard Features Missing: "None"
Software
- Server OS: Windows, any Unix, BSD, MacOsx
- Language: PHP
- Database: dba or Pear DB or none (flat file, cvs)
- Required Software: Apache (or other webserver), PHP
- Installation Difficulty: Untar and configure a huge index.php. Databases (if wanted) have to be initialized. No automatic installer or tool. For more compilcated farms or pretty urls some work has do be done (setting apache handlers). No binaries needed. INSTALL instructions are not really newbie friendly. Runs out of the box normally.
- License: GPL
- Standard Features Missing (see WikiEngineReviewStandardFeatures): "None"
WikiFarms
- Name / cost / limits / URL / backup schedule / comments: PhpWikiDemo? is a sample farm for multi-lingual and multi-theme testing. No commercial farms.
Content
- Display WardsWiki text? PhpWiki will this wiki properly display text marked up with the WardsWiki text formatting rules. With the portland theme it even the full layout looks like wards. See http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/demo/portland/WikiEngineReviewTextFormattingTest (using old markup).
- Text formatting rules: Old markup is almost the same. New markup is more block oriented, uses *bold*, _italic_, allows some basic html tags, eases blockwise indenting and has better tables.
- Headings? ! for h4, !! for h3 and !!! for h2, h1 is reserved for the title.
- Allowable WikiNames: No enhancements or differences to the original allowable WikiNames, besides proper i18n. WardsWiki names are created by concatenating two or more capitalized words, without any adjacent capital letters. Numbers and spaces are not allowed.
- Finegrained Linktargets? Doable, but not really easy.
- Subpages? Yes: just use "/" in a pagename.
- Max Page Size: Just the browser specific edit box size limit.
- Tables? | at the beginning, and enhancable by various plugins.
- Images? asis, as link (see img and link to another page), InterWiki image buttons also.
- Attachments? via the UpLoad? plugin, uses a magical UpLoad?: Interwiki link. Not overwritable.
- Editing Contention Resolution Prevention and resolving of simultaneous editing (Diff)
Readability
- Search capabilities: google like search syntax. title, fulltext or fuzzy search.
- Email notification of changes: pagenames (glob-style regex) to any registered user. emeial is simply verified (no ticket, no email hook)
- Diffs: very good colored diff engine. diffs between arbitrary revisions and authors.
Security
- Embedded HTML (a risk): Admin has to enable a RawHtml? plugin (default disabled). A very limited and safe subset of HTML tags (no attributes) is supported with new markup. No applet, object, script, ... tags, and the "onClick" et al. attributes. No javascript protection against embedded urls (frameinclude, includepage), but they may be disallowed globally.
- Password protection? user-login for editing and prefs. With the next release full hierarchical ACL and group support. Special "Bogo" login policy: Usernames must be WikiWord
- Delete Pages? Admin can delete multiple pages at once. With the next release and ACL's every owner also.
- Revision Snapshots? The database holds most revisions.
- Rollback: Restauration by manual copy&paste, by anyone. No special restore button.
- Delete Snapshots? Not to my knowledge.
Extendability
General Note: Several desirable features are often not available. Depending on how the page content is stored, these features can be provided by "packaged" external programs; for example, htDig to provide extended search capability. This section is intended to capture appropriate information.
Page content will be stored in one of five ways (I think):
- a large "hash" file? (dbm?)
- a large "text file" with a custom organization
- in another custom storage mechanism, perhaps intrinsic to the programming environment (like for Squeak Swikis?)
- small text files, one per page
- in a database with each page as a record (perhaps with additional information in the same record or in related records)
With at least the last two methods of storage, features not supported directly by the wiki might be obtained easily.
- Pages stored in individual text files? Optionally. Flatfile or CVS. (not well supported)
- Pages can be added / deleted from directory and wiki will recognize automatically? No
- Pages stored in database? Yes (default): dba or SQL
- Database provides phrase, boolean, and proximity search? Yes (with workarounds for non db-native capabilities)
- Database supports global (across pages) search and replace? Yes, with highlighted preview.
- Pages can be added / deleted from database and wiki will recognize automatically? Sure. There are also plans to render and optionally edit content from external databases via templates in the wiki. (connection to a moviedatabase e.g. and the wiki as GUI and rating engine)
Working Well with Others
- Static or dynamic web pages: Hybrid, smart caching.
- Indexed by search engines? Good if USE_PATH_INFO true. (20% percent of the userbase manages to enable this)
- InterWiki Links? Full support.
- Import / Export Features: im- and export as mimified email, htmldumps, zipdumps or simple pages.
- Translators to/from other Wikis? By various plugins.
Miscellaneous
- Extra Features: Various brandnew features as they are discussed at UseMod or PhpWiki. Both are usually the first. (such as interwiki search, xml-rpc, soap, rss feeds, blogging, ...). Such as currently a rating and recommendation system. http://www.wikilens.org/
- References:
* http://phpwiki.sf.net/phpwiki (stable)
* http://phpwiki.sf.net/demo (farm and latest)
* http://phpwiki.sf.net/test (fresh cvs code)
* http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/acadwiki
* http://www.wikilens.org/ (rating and automatic recommendations)
* http://wiki.crao.net/ (many good themes)
* http://mpickering.homeip.net/phpwiki/ (good theme)
Originator / Author, Maintainer, Contributors
- Originator / Author: -- ReiniUrban
- Contributors:
- <add your Wiki name, move this to next line>
CategoryWikiEngineReview
Wiki Engine Review Php Wiki