[pmwiki-users] selling pmwiki to high school students

[Oliver Betz]

Peter Bowers wrote:

>I am teaching a high school class in computers and our most recent project
>was creating a site in WordPress and in PMWiki.  At the end my students
>were not overly enamored with the setup and configuration of pmwiki and
>wanted to know why they would ever use that over WordPress.

I agree with jdd and Crisses, and add security and control.

Security: Read the Secunia advisories about both products:
http://secunia.com/advisories/product/6195/ (PmWiki)

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/33191/ (WordPress) is not enough
because usually you use tons of 3rd party extensions with much more
problems.

Control: PmWiki is so sophisticated and efficient that you can do most
things without obscure extensions, e.g. by adding small code
fragments. Page Text Variables and Pagelists provide "semantic" stuff
out of the box.

Compare a basic installation. The PmWiki core is 340kBytes
(uncompressed), although the code lacks comments, a single person can
look through it.

WordPress has 20x the PHP code. This affects both security and
control. And usually you will add 3rd party code adding more
complexity and risk.

Not forgetting the requirements: WordPress should get 256MB of memory,
isn't it? And a MySQL database. A PmWiki installation runs nearly
everywhere, is easy to backup and move.

>I gave several thoughts but then I promised to write to the list to get
>further input.
>
>If you were "selling" pmwiki to a group of high school students with
>limited technical experience but good potential, what would you say are its
>top advantages as compared with WP?

I know you mean the advantage for the students, but the advantage for
you is that you will learn about the students. The clever ones will
see the advantages.

Oliver
-- 
Oliver Betz, Munich http://oliverbetz.de/