I love wiki applications. Not the Wikipedia, a famous encyclopedia website which runs on MediaWiki engine, but these kind of software at all. They are super useful as a content management system (CMS) to run your website, especially when it has a lot of interlinked articles and you want to bring some structure into it. This Google Blogger/Blogpost website is just a damn parody of normal CMS and it is very sketchy to use.
I wanted to make a big move from Blogpost to my own hosted wiki and was recently researching what options do I have. I had my own list of requirements for the prospective solution:
- the wiki engine should be open source, lightweight to be hosted on a potato (or free web hosting) and it should be using PHP or Perl or Python - this is what you can get easily on such hostings
- it should not require any SQL databases as a storage backend but to use plain files as a storage instead. For many reasons. I don't want to maintain it, make sure it's not running out of space, make proper backups and restore in case of failure. When the wiki storage backend is just files, you can backup them easily
- ideally it should have a built-in editor for pages. It might sound like a joke, but you'll see it later that not all of the engines do support that
- it should support Markdown syntax. Just because I got tired of dealing with WYSIWYG HTML editor of Blogpost, which is messing with HTML tags all the time. Custom wiki syntax for articles must die.
- Last but not least. The project should be alive and not abandoned. Yes, if it meets all the above requirements, we can always take our MD files with us away from it, but if we're selecting a good candidate for us to use now, it should have at least his heart running well.
So let's do some comparison.
MediaWiki 😕
It doesn't have an option to run on a top of flat files as a backend.
TiddlyWiki and TiddlyMemo 😟
https://tiddlywiki.com/
https://tiddlymemo.org/
Not actually a wiki engine you can host somewhere on a webserver and have remote access from anywhere. It is a single HTML file with a lot of JS. With using JS controls you edit your own notes/pages with using web browser and then you click on "Save" button which generates you an updated HTML file you save (either as a version+1 of your wiki, or just override it). So it's more like a local wiki, which requires you to take it with yourself all the time.
But if you ask me, it's very fragile approach to trust into aJS code to do it's job properly. If it screws and if you were not making proper backups yourself, your work will vanish in the thin air.
MDwiki 😞
https://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/#!index.md
I really love the idea: you just place a single html file somewhere on a webserver, where you store markdown documents (file.md) and then you access them like http://yourwebserver/index.html#!file.md
That html file has JS scripts in it to fetch and render the MD documents you reference.
Unfortunately the project is no longer being developed and it's very buggy.
I tried it multiple times and I cannot recommend it.
DokuWiki 👍
A good old mature wiki engine which supports everything I need.
Does support Markdown syntax with this plugin - https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:markdowku
Wiki.js
Requires node.js. This is no for us.
Gollum
https://github.com/gollum/gollum
Requires Ruby. This is no for us.
Gitit
Requires Haskell. Again big no.
PMWiki 😞
A good candidate on a paper, worth trying.
But what worries me is that the Markdown plugin - https://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Markdown - was updated last time more than 16 years ago and ppl are saying it's no longer compatible with current versions of wiki.
There's another Markdown plugin - https://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/MarkdownMarkupExtension - which might do a better job, but it requires an eclosing of markdown syntax into additional tags like this:
(:markdown:) Test ==== (:markdownend:)
So for now it's NO.
FOSwiki 😐
https://foswiki.org/Home/WebHome
Written on Perl, which is more rare option to see among free web hosting providers.
Markdown is implemented by this plugin - https://foswiki.org/Extensions/MarkdownPlugin
It requires to add an additional littering macro on the page like:
Content can either be written within the topic area itself using:
%STARTMARKDOWN%...%STOPMARKDOWN%or by using the
%MARKDOWNmakro:%MARKDOWN{text="..."}%or by reading a file attachment:
%MARKDOWN{topic="..." attachment="....md"}%
So this is no for me.
IKIWiki
Not actually a wiki engine but a perl compiler to produce a set of HTML pages out of your git or svn repo (and it acts as a svn client or git remote). Has a native support of Markdown.
If you ask me, the idea is quite nice, but from the brief look on a project website it does't give a feel of something mature with a lot of community. Also it's not something you'll be able to use as a hosted web application.
ODDMuse
Requires perl. Very minimalistic - I tried to play with it online using their own website, and quite subjectively this is below the level of minimalism I can afford. I'll give you this example - if you edit a page and you want to see how it looks like, by pressing a "Preview" button, it doesn't show you the actual rendered result. So for me it's no.
Peperminty Wiki 👍
https://peppermint.mooncarrot.space/
What's good about it is that it's being actively developed, uses PHP, based on plain text files and supports Markdown out of the box. I have played with it quite a lot and even raised a couple of small issues about the bugs I found.
The biggest issue right now is that if you modify MD files externally, you need to remove the internal index file so wiki will rebuild it. This implicitly means that you also loose whatever tags and dates your pages were having, as it is also stored in that index file - https://github.com/sbrl/Pepperminty-Wiki/issues/242
Aneuch ✋
https://www.aneuch.org/
https://github.com/ajgraves/aneuch
Requires perl. Somewhat similar idea to Pepperminty Wiki - a single perl file to rule-them-all. Looks very mature but the bad thing is it is no longer developed. Last commit was like 2 years ago.
Summing up
So, as far as you can see there're not so many candidates I can choose from.
Recently I have found a good website which does the comparison of many wiki engines - https://www.wikimatrix.org/
One might be interested to revisit this comparison at some later point.
Also worth reading a below article. It highlights some very worrying trends in modern software, which is having a bad tendency towards clouds and locking your data into proprietary cage - https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/
