PMWiki

I used to maintain an HTML based web site to keep track of my job related research. I wanted to have a personal portal where I publish the results of my research, my job related reference material, articles and a collection of links for my reference and easy access. However building and maintaining it was time consuming. When it got to the point that the productive time was less than the construction time, I decided to switch to a different technology. I started to look for alternatives. I tried Blogs but their chronological architecture did not fit my purpose. I looked at the Content Management Applications but their heavy footprint and proprietary architecture were not appealing. I wanted a simple, lightweight, and open platform. Than one day I saw an article in the PC Magazine article about Wikis.

I knew about Wiki as I am a heavy user of Wikipedia. I trust Wikipedia so much that on most occasions, I search items first in Wikipedia then Google it. So I thought of using a wiki engine before but never got to it. The PC Magazine article excited me so I gave it a shot. I just didn't know how easy it would be to install and operate it. I selected PMWiki because of its text based repository, simplicity and small footprint. It requires Apache and PHP but don't worry if you have no experience in either as there are packages that includes Apache, PHP and even MySQL like EasyPHP which is very easy to install. But if you will deploy it to a hosted environment and just want a local test environment, PMWiki actually comes with a tiny web server so you do not need anything. The whole package is less then 8MB with all the documentation which you can delete and It works instantly.

I deployed my company web site on PMWiki and use it like an online notebook from anywhere, building a knowledge portal on matters about IT Architecture. It is not public yet as I need to shape it up a little and sort out the security issues.