The software that powers this wiki. Originally developed as a Zope product and since extended to work within Plone. This legacy shows in several ways.
What’s Good
- Stable code base with active developer community. New releases every few weeks.
- Fairly capable as a standalone CMS.
- Fully functional with or without Plone.
- A preview feature that’s standard everywhere but missing in Plone.
- Automatic page id generation that turns out non-ugly ids.
- A hierarchical system of organisation that does not reflect in the URL, allowing unlimited reorganisation without breaking links.
What’s Not
- Default CamelCase markup can be turned off, but the !CamelCase no-link convention continues to apply unless ! marks are doubled, as in !!CamelCase. Makes pasting code in a wiki page painful.
- Wikipedia-style explicit links are possible, but links have to display the full name of the page.
- No redirects or aliases. The plural and singular forms of a term become separate pages.
- Wiki undo/history feature is really a ZODB database feature and hence not reliable at the user level.
- Not a first class Plone object, thereby losing out on Plonish features like keywords (aka tags).
- Two template systems (for with or without Plone), with no clear distinction between them, making customisation tricky. Way too much legacy DTML for comfort in 2006.
- Hardcoded hacks to work around Plone template structure, making customisation trickier. This site’s implementation required patching the code, making upgrades non-trivial.
Alternatives
- Wicked is a framework for Plone that allows wiki links within Plone content objects — but only if the developer opted to turn it on. Wicked is not an end user product. When it becomes better accepted, I’ll consider migrating to it from ZWiki.
