Need help setting up Wiki software

[AK-Dave]

I am trying to set up my own Wiki as a proof-of-concept for a content management system/knowledgebase for the agency I work for. The intent is for the finished product to be available locally on the network (no gateway/proxy server address) and possibly offline on a DVD or external hard drive.

The initial hardware will be my personal Intel-based iMac, which has 2GB Ram, a 100MB partition with WinXP personal(or home edition or whatever it's called), and a CoreDuo processor (I forget the exact model/clock speed).

I will probably have to run WinXP on the final product, so the software used will need to run on it. I will need to know if XP home edition will work of if I need WinXP pro.

The software I am looking at is the WikiMedia software and probably MySQL, with Apache or, as a last resort, IIS (remember, after it's set up, it will never touch the internet)

Any tips, suggestions, etc would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
David

[huw-l]

http://www.wikimatrix.org

For a small site I would reccomend something other than mediawiki. There are plenty of wikis out there that don't need a database.

[AK-Dave]

I'll take a look, but what I envision for the final product will have a significant amount of data with links to pictures, word and pdf documents, movie and sound clips, which will be located on a server on the local network. I also want to ensure that the software will be supported in the future, and I don't see WikiMedia going away anytime soon.

-David

[jimlintott]

Ubuntu has Mediawiki (http://packages.ubuntu.com/feisty/web/mediawiki) as one of it's available packages. All the other required software, PHP, Apache and a database server are all open source and available as Ubuntu packages. I wouldn't be surprised that if you had a copy of Ubuntu server (free download) that you could have Mediawiki working inside an hour on an older (or newer :)) x86 based PC.

That's how I'd approach it.

[AK-Dave]

http://www.wikimatrix.org

For a small site I would reccomend something other than mediawiki. There are plenty of wikis out there that don't need a database.

Thanks for that link, it may answer my questions. I'm still wading through all the info there. I'd still like to hear any input from the people here.

-David

[AK-Dave]

I just came across instructions for installing MediaWiki on MacOS X, so I think I may do that, initially. I am sure I'll need help with PHP as I try things out.

Thanks,
David

[JamesM]

I set up a MediaWiki on Linux a couple of months ago. It was very straightforward. All the configuration is done through your web browser. As long as you have control over installing what you need and know the right password for your MySQL database etc., it should be a cinch.

The only thing to look out for is if there are any other things that need to run on the machine that runs the wiki. Some versions of MediaWiki used PHP 4, later versions need PHP 5. As far as I can make out, it is non trivial having both versions of PHP on the same machine, so if there's something that absolutely positively needs PHP 4, you may be stuck with an earlier version of MediaWiki. It wasn't a big deal as far as my wiki usage went, however.

Upgrading the wiki across the PHP 4 to 5 version barrier was a bit trickier, because the database schema had changed. This should be as simple as just running some scripts that come with the install, but I had to do some extra faffing around, due to some typical Linux issues. This is a non-issue if you just do a fresh install of the latest version, though.

[AK-Dave]

Quick update:
After trying (for about 1 1/2 hours) to install the appropriate packages on OSX, I gave up and decided to try a windows installer. I found an all-in-one installer for PHP, MySQL and Apache (XAMPP), and it was up and running in under 30 minutes. If I had the time to learn what little knowledge is needed to run it under OSX, I'd do that, but my brain is kind of full at the moment. As a proof-of-concept project, running it on WinXP on my iMac seems to be working fine. Now I just need to learn more about how to take advantage of various features of and options for the WikiMedia package.

-David