[pmwiki-users] Selecting a Wiki engine...

[Oliver Betz]

Hi All,

running several (currently broken) PhpWiki based wikis, I'm strongly 
considering to switch to a better maintained Wiki engine. PmWiki is 
on the top, I will also check DokuWiki and maybe Mediawiki again.

Since I'm no PHP programmer (I'm doing embedded stuff in "plain C"), 
I can't dig into the code but have to rate it from a "dumb user's" 
view, so I would like to learn more about PmWiki's (or other Wiki's) 
non-obvious characteristics and strengths (or weaknesses).


For example, I read that Mediawiki has a "suboptimal" code with many 
globals, rather hard to maintain. Well, I have to believe it. Obvious 
for me is that Mediawiki has no option to purge the page history, 
that's a severe disadvantage for me (limited storage in hosted 
environment, maybe performance issues).


Availability: although I see that Patrick R. Michaud and the very 
active community do a great job improving PmWiki, I would like to 
know whether there are more (potential) "core" developers, IOW 
whether there is a good change that PmWiki will be maintained even if 
PM stopped development some day.


Security: is PHP really that bad (e.g. compared Perl) in terms of 
security? The PmWiki code didn't seem to have many security issues in 
the past. Is it written more defensive than other applications?

So many questions - maybe someone can point out whether or why PmWiki 
is the best choice...

TIA,

Oliver
-- 
Oliver Betz, Muenchen