Talk:Documentation

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Comparisons with CMS

One of the challenges is to get people adopting MediaWiki as a CMS system not just a collaborative article clearing-house. Though MediaWiki is a collaborative tool, not a lockdown CMS, it rates well as a CMS. It shares many abilities of main open-source CMSs such as Joomla and Drupal. Mediawiki offers the following advantages:

• Scaleability (Wikipedia)
• Simplicity of installation
• Full history
• Image and media handling
• Ease of use
• Enthusiastic developer community
• Well established extension writing procedures

User Observations

The CMS test and comparison site Opensourcecms rates Mediawiki 4.3 out of 5 and has a comments section which includes the following user observations:

• Mediawiki is great. I especially like the fact that it keeps all the changes so that you can few the history of every page (and roll back if you are the author or admin)
• It's just great for my simple Hebrew, utf8 & multilingual editing requirements. easily installed (web config)
• Very easy to use wiki but hard to customize. What i miss is a better management to disable public page edit.
• Arguably the best wiki out there, however it falls short in many other areas. For starters, if you do not like coding - stay away from Mediawiki. It is extremey user UN-friendly as it has no backend control panel, and creating your own skins is like pulling teeth. Content wise, you can't beat its functionality.

CMS Matrix

The CMS matrix widely referred to in the literature does not even refer to MediaWiki. There is a home-spun version featured in a simplified way on an education website that plugs Dupal, its article on Mediawiki (http://elearning.psu.edu/drupalineducation/mediawiki) comments:

• This is great for making sites that community members can edit, nothing more. Wiki's all look (relatively) the same so if you need theme support this isn't the place to find a flexible one. It's also very simplistic in terms of permissions / access restrictions so if you're a control freak and need lots of different permissions you'll probably want something more advanced too.

What is interesting is that much of this no longer applies, leaving the positives the same article refers to:

• MediaWiki is a great platform for building a Wiki-site and doing it quickly. It's relatively easy to install and setup and once it's up you're done. Mediawiki is based off the same platform that powers Wikipedia, the worlds most well known / visible wiki-site. It allows you to get into creating Wiki-sites quickly, much faster then any of the other CMS compared here.

There is also a specialised Wikimatrix.

Web 2.0 Features

Some CMSs specialise in the blogging/social networking area. CMSCritic notes that some CMSs offer the following features, only some of which are implemented in MediaWiki:

• Blogs
• Internal message system
• Forums (inkspot)
• Chatrooms
• File sharing
• Profile / pictures rating
• Profile views
• Private photo gallery
• Nudges (kisses, slaps, ...)
• User comments
• Events calendar
• Personal events
• Profile
• Dashboard
• Activity feed
• User preferences
• Comprehensive administration tools
• OpenSocial applications
• File repository
• Forums
• Social bookmarking

Progress towards CMS

The issues that are raised in the literature identify the following challenges:

• Insufficient permissions granularity (addressed by SimpleSecurity)
• Interface too dfficult (Addressed by SimpleForms and WYSIWYGs)
• Other CRMs do better in terms of forum, blog, chat, gallery, social networking, tag clouds, polls, ratings, search engine optimisation, e-commerce, noting the Web 2.0 features above.
• The lack of user-skinning capacity, and template availability and user-installability, is problematic. It is also an opportunity for developers to earn a living by providing absolute customization, thereby making the site suitable for the user's public site.