Drupal and wikis?

Thanks! I found the example wiki site from that talk (http://johnthomson.org/druwiki/) -- I'll give it a look-over and keep an eye out for video. The fellow who made the site included info on the modules he used and how he set things up, but I'm curious to hear more, particularly about the philosophical design aspects he mentions.

I took a look at that group earlier but it didn't look like there's been any activity in the past several months and that made me uneasy. I'm still working to get a sense of how long information various Drupal solutions stays "fresh" despite upgrades and version changes... at this point I feel pretty clueless about that and it makes me hesitant to go off anything that isn't very recent. I hope that as I keep doing this I'll develop an awareness of what info is useful and what has become dated or irrelevant.

I gave the group another look and went ahead and joined... I'll hear if there's any new activity, and maybe I'll ask them a question or two of my own. Thanks!

Hi Lin,

The course I'm making this website for has students work on a series of team-based projects that culminate in a big end-of-semester show that draws an international audience. I'm intending the website/wiki to be (1) the course's public face to the world, (2) a way to orient students and provide assignments, tutorials, etc, (3) a general knowledgebase resource, and (4) administrative aid for the TAs, staff, faculty, and outside contractors who make this beast run.

So I've got visitors (anonymous users), outside collaborators (mostly people running tech for the show), department faculty&staff, students who are in the course, TAs for the course, course instructors, and the site administrator/webmaster. I think I can handle permissions by role, but it needs to be page- and file-specific. I'm tentatively planning that all authenticated users (except perhaps the outside collaborators) will have permission to create and edit wiki pages, but for almost every role there will be some sections of the wiki that they can view but not edit, and others they should not even be able to view.

I used Taxonomy Access Control Lite for really basic access control on a team blog last semester... I'll have to take a look at Content Access and Access Control List now that I'm doing something more involved.

Thanks!

Hm. More and more I'm thinking about using Drupal for the overall website and MediaWiki for the wikis, but I get scared wondering whether I can make them place nicely together. Also, I've never worked with MediaWiki before -- how difficult is it to get going with it?

I've done up a mindmap of my site structure -- I envision it as a Drupal site that contains three wikis: "Knowledgebase," "BVW Show Bible," and "Freespace" (these could be either Drupal- or MediaWiki-based). Each wiki has slightly different access restrictions, but they're each internally consistent with the same restrictions for every wiki page.

So maybe I could use Drupal to manage access (I'm looking at the MediaWiki auth bridge module) and then let MediaWiki do what it does best. I'm hoping if I dig around I'll find people who have used MediaWiki auth bridge so I can check out their results & determine if I like what I see. The biggest thing that turns me off is that I'm not sure I'd be able to keep a consistent look (or even a consistent main navigation) across Drupal and MediaWiki. I wouldn't want the overall website to appear disjointed, as though the wikis were completely separate sites. That might be enough to keep me on the Drupal-only path.

Absolutely - and a site that folks can add pages to and edit freely needn't be called a "wiki". Wikis are pretty structureless (without aggressive editorial oversight, that is) so it's hard for me to imagine "sections" of a wiki to which you could sensibly apply different permissions for each role. Maybe a different idiom makes more sense (such as Drupal's "book"...).

Thanks a lot for the comparison info between the druwiki set-up and MediaWiki. It's helpful to know, even if it's not what I'd hoped -- I'll gauge my expectations appropriately. I think you and Michael H are right... what I'm looking for has some wiki-like properties but also incorporates more structured elements that need secure access control, so (even if MediaWiki is the better wiki) maybe Drupal is right for what I need overall.

I just hope I can make the more wiki-ish interactions with the site (free-form page creation, linking, and editing) painless enough that the community of people involved with this course will use the knowledgebase and keep it alive!