Wiki!

[bbrendon]

Alexei and others-

Can we re-vitalize the wiki? Can it be more like a normal wiki where its easy to add content, register, get access, and have fun? I would honestly rather have a mess like voip-info.org than nothing at all. (I don't advocate that the zabbix wiki will be a mess. Just a comparison)

I think the current wiki died because no one had access and people who did have access have long since forgotten their passwords. I know two people in the past who have and asked me to update the wiki because of this.

Background:
I've been away from Zabbix mostly because it was working relatively well and I have better things to do. (yea right) Unfortunately I've just spent the last day documenting our monitoring system in detail, and although I have invented may things to make our zabbix work great, I'm always finding bugs and creative solutions which is why the WIKI is on my mind.

Not only that, but Zabbix does have bugs. I encounter them all the time. I think so frequently I just ignore them now (bad me). I don't mean to beat up Alexei, Zabbix is great, but a wiki would make it easier to highlight these bugs as well so they can be fixed.

I know others are doing cool shit as well with Zabbix and I think a wiki would make it easier to express that.

Zabbix is truely great. It does things that no other product does, its lightweight (lets not compare to RRD here heh), it does cool stuff, it saves my but. Anyway, not to over-glorify zabbix. I do curse at the screen when configuring it. I've wished it gone, but I can't find anything else to love.

Okay. Enough drama. Who wants to respond?

[Alexei]

I would be very happy to see active ZABBIX Wiki here. Ideally user accounts and passwords must be shared between ZABBIX Forums and the wiki.

The biggest problem is choice of Wiki software. I'm open for ideas and I would appreciate very much if one could point me to an open Wiki platform with nice design which could be easily configured and maintained.

[WeBRainstorm]

Suggested Wiki

Dear Alexei,
I'm a fan of Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/).

I think it's the best product to help opensource development.
It integrates a wiki, a bug tracker and has full support for subversion.
It can easy correlate bugs with SVN revision and has a lot of cool features.

It's widely used, you can see it in action at http://www.freepbx.org/trac/ (that's an opensource project in which I'm involved)

It has Sqlite, MySQL, Postgres backend. I think that with a pair of views you can integrate the same user base but I never had a deep look in its code from that point of view

My 2 cents

Regards

-Ed

[bbrendon]

For public wiki's I have always liked mediawiki.

For commercial/private wikis, it would be a bad choice. For our company, we use a commercial wiki

[rdg]

Confluence from Atlassian

I evaluated them all and one stands out, Confluence. It's a commercial wikí, open source but with a free community licenses.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/

Install it in any application server, with any database on an OS of your choice.

/R

[charles]

dokuwiki

Sorry, I haven't been very active with Zabbix lately, but I am a fan of dokuwiki. It has a simple and flexible authentication mechanism which should be easy to tie to the vbulletin authentication.

http://www.splitbrain.org/projects/dokuwiki

http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:auth:backends

hth
charles

[bbrendon]

I evaluated them all and one stands out, Confluence. It's a commercial wikí, open source but with a free community licenses.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/

Install it in any application server, with any database on an OS of your choice.
/R

I think confluence is great for commercial use, but there are a few things I don't like about it that really stand out.
-Resource intense because it requires a java server
-IMO overly complex for a public wiki
-Can not break out sub-section editing

[bbrendon]

Bump!
Has this gone anywhere?! Lets not forget about it.

[Alexei]

I vote for DokuWiki with vBulletin authentication. I believe this is good start which has easy upgrade path to more complex solution. What do you all think?

[charles]

I agree

[bbrendon]

Fine with me.

[nelsonab]

I know I'm late to the party...

Might I suggest a closer look at Trac??

It's integration between a ticketing system/ code revision/ code milestones and wiki is amazing! In fact every ticket you open is it's own wiki, and to reference a ticket (bug) within a wiki is as simple as referencing it's number ie #42 will link to ticket 42. When that ticket get's closed you will then see a line through the link to 42.

I realize this may not *quite* be fully suitable for a public facing code repository, but if you were to remove the code portion of it, it makes for an *excellent* tightly integrated ticketing/wiki system.

At one company I work for we use trac to monitor our IT helpdesk tickets and system confiruation notes.

[bbrendon]

Can we see some screenshots or a demo?
I checked out the Trac demo, but the demo doesn't seem to describe it such as you describe. Probably because its full of spam and I don't want to spend an hour figuring out how to leverage it to the max.

[nelsonab]

The main trac ( http://trac.edgewall.com ) site itself is a pretty good representation of how it can be used. Go to the "View Tickets" tab and click on one of the various reports. I clicked on the following ticket which demonstrates the linking of other tickets within the comments very nicely.

http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/4431

You'll also notice the url is very straightforward.

The trac-hacks site also shows some of the more advanced capabilities of trac through the various extensions.

http://www.trac-hacks.org

I hope this gives enough information to help with the process. If there is enough interest I can help in some of the setup. I'm not an expert, but I've setup two different trac servers so far, one virtual hosted with 4 seperate projects one of which was the IT project described above and another install which is only for use as an IT helpdesk/wiki.

[nelsonab]

oops... I forgot to link the following page too:

http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracLinks

It shows the various inter-trac links which are available within the wiki.