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This is an old revision of IndependentWikkaReviews made by PbkT1e on 2007-05-31 10:42:40.

 

Independent Reviews

This is a list of opinions taken from independent reviews of Wikka. Please feel free to add you own external links and review summaries.

The wiki uses the fantastic Wikka Wiki software. I had a trial wiki setup using MediaWiki but found that software to be rather cumbersome for a small wiki. (...)
So after a quick browse on Wikipedia’s wiki software list I found Wikka Wiki and was quickly enamored with its friendly community and decent feature list. Once I saw that its pages rendered nicely in Lynx I was hooked. The only thing I need to change for text browsers is that external links get an infinity symbol added on by default, which in the text browsers makes them look like Slashdotinfty.

I stumbled across WikkaWiki, home page here. It has integrated FreeMind and displays them within the actual WikkaWiki pages. In fact, WikkaWiki has a slew of embeddable elements from images to RSS feeds to Flash. It's pretty close to the "keep track of my meandering" type tool I'm looking for. But it's modal and I don't want modal. Everyone is building vi and I want emacs.

WikkaWiki looks quite interesting from that Wikipedia listing. The actual site for WikkaWiki is here. You can see it in action here. Those movies show it doing something akin to what I'd like a mind mapper to do, namely work as a combination of mind mapper, wiki, and browser all in one. WikkaWiki does allow you to link in mind maps without too much trouble, but it's still two separate apps. Again. Promising. By having it open along with a secondary browser I might almost have what I want. But the mindmapping software is separate -- but you can include it in the WikkaWiki. Like I said, promising.

Sehr gelungen finde ich WikiMatrix, da es sehr übersichtlich gestaltet ist und man auswählen kann welche Systeme man gegeneinander vergleichen kann. Dabei habe ich festgestellt das WikkaWiki sich schon sehr weit entwickelt hat und das man u.a. mit Hilfe der Erweiterungen einiges anstellen kann.

I wanted a wiki for my site, as I find wiki a wonderful tool for collaborative development of ideas. I needed to make a choice, so I googled for wiki comparision tables, and reviews. I found several of them, and at first I chose MediaWiki as the most well known wiki out there. Well, after I have downloaded it and have taken a quick look around, it ticked me that it was way too big than what I imagined it would be. After careful investigation of the same comparison tables I put my finger on WikkaWiki that, compared to lots of other lightweight wiki tools is still being developed.
Installation was a breeze, quick and easy. I put a full copy of the distribution in a separate directory, and linked to it from where I wanted my wiki to be. I wanted several of them in different places and separate, and that way I was able to make that happen with ease. Everything happens on a single installation page, and after you have filled it with all necessary data, it creates the database tables for you, and initializes your wiki. The configuration file is put in the local directory, and you are free to modify it if needed.

Finally I found WikkaWiki, and I saw opened Heaven: small, easy to install and use, good security, customizable by CSS and very important XHML 1.0 compliant.

The Wikka wakka wiki is sensational. Very programmer friendly. Lots of little coding examples. Very easy to extend.

I’ve been trying to find a wiki engine that suits my needs and at the moment I quite like Wikka partly because I’ve managed to meet a few of the items on my criteria list below. A Good Wiki Should…

I've been interested in Soft Systems Methodology for many years, including taking serveral courses based on the work of Peter Checkland and others as part of my BSc, but I've always been disappointed by the lack of tool support for the approach. Last week I was looking for a light weight Wiki solution to deploy on an older machine, and I came across Wikka Wiki, which had built in support for FreeMind, a superb free (as in speach) mind map solution.

I enjoy wikis; they're a very useful way to store (and view) information. I recently wrote about Instiki. I needed a new wiki to use for phpmygrades, so I started lookin’ around. Sourceforge recommends you keep a lot of your data (especially stuff that’s written to by the webserver) in a MySQL database. Because of this, I tried Wikka, and I am very pleased with it! I’m too lazy to write a full review right now (and I’ll probably stay this way for quite some time…), so I’ll just note a few good points I noticed:

After trying various other Wiki implementations, I came by WikkaWiki. It has all the usual features of a wiki, but isn't too loaded with features that I don't need. I just need some wiki functionality. Looking at the code, it was quite easy to customize. And fully XHTML and CSS-based, which is also a big plus.

My personal knowledge/life/research management system is based on a wiki system (was zwiki, now WikkaWiki Wikka wiki). When I am working on something by extensively using one or more Wiki pages, I usually use the Wikka category feature to mark a page as CurrentWork (sometimes plus a certain degree of importance) so later I can retrieve them by visiting a dynamically generated CurrentWork page.
However, the unit of organization has to be a page. I am against prematurely creating too many low granularity pages so I have many ongoing big Wiki nodes which will only be broken down into small ones later when necessary. Within some big nodes, I have small todos which can be marked with a couple of unique strings. Wikka provides a feature called Text Search Expanded which will return the context a search string resides in along with the page title. When I search those unique strings, I can get a list of smaller todos. Using it in combination with the category feature, I feel it very productive. It works like tagging but the granularity level is much lower.


Features that make Wikka Wiki a winner:
In short, it’s a dinkum wiki. Glad I took the time to install so many and play around with them before I settled on Wikka, and that OS X had most of the tools needed built into it’s foundation so that it was relatively painless to do so.

I decided to build the Central Intake wiki using the WikkaWiki engine. It's responsive, has an almost "weblog"/word processor-like toolbar across the top for building links, and allows people to edit pages by "double-clicking" in the text area.
I think people will catch on pretty qwikily.
Later: How much do I like WikkaWiki? Enough to dump weblog software and use it instead.


I was recently looking around at wiki scripts to run my own wiki-based projects. Naturally, the first script I looked at was the MediaWiki script used by Wikipedia. In fact, at the time, I already had in mind to use that script. It had not occurred to me that there might be any other script to use. After opening up the script to poke around, however, I realized that it was so horrible that not only was I dissuaded from using it without looking for other scripts, I was resolved that it would probably be better to write my own wiki script than to use the MediaWiki script (luckily, I didn’t have to, because Wikka is pretty good)

I have been using my wiki on mookiesplace.org for keeping track of stuff that is not time-based (like the stuff here on ultramookie). But, I have found that the RSSInfo RSS facilities built into WikkaWiki Wikka Wakka Wiki is really useful! I am using my wiki a lot lately as my web-based newsreader because it is so simple to setup and use.

I think WikkaWiki has some strong points, even compared to MediaWiki. To me, it’s a good balance between features and lightness. (davidm)
David, I fully agree I installed WikkaWiki locally today and I have played with it some and it’s just what I was looking for. It has all the features that I wanted without feeling like it is bloated like MediaWiki can be at times (Niloc)


Amongst the very many wikies available (all of them with very similar names!!) this is my favourite as it is very compact, easy to install, but yet offer the possibility to make certain pages public and certain others not.

Roger Schank (1988) points out that creativity consists of two subprocesses: 1) Search process, looking among previously experienced explanation patterns. 2) Alteration process, modifying an explanation derived from one situation to be used in another.
If I look at the subprocess 1, Internet search engines and new personalised search agents look quite promising to me with simplified UIs. With these search tools it is quite easy to find out what is publicly known about the topic and whether my own approach is unique. Sometimes the ability to visualise things and see their connections is even more valuable. Therefore, I am currently excited about mindmap tools that could help me visualise large data masses like blogosphere (Mindmanager X5 and open source variants WikkaWiki linked to FreeMind).


[M]y first wiki was MediaWiki, and I just decided it was.. 'too much'. I wanted something that was easier, cleaner interface, and where new users with something to say would be more likely to add content and ended up with WikkaWiki (Jason Rahaim)

I've come to the end of my reach with my current WikiEngine and its come to pick a new one. [...] I've decided to go with Wikka Wiki, which is a fork of a dead project called WakkaWiki. Yes, Wakka does sound familiar, and yes it was named after the Final Fantasy X character. Until reading further about each Get Wiki was going to be the primary choice, as it was a fork of an older version of MediaWiki (1.1.0). What made me choose Wikka was the fact that it supported embedding FreeMind FreeMind MindMaps. You can simply copy the 'code' of the FreeMind MindMap into the page and it will render a FreeMind MindMap into the page. Or you can simply upload your FreeMind MindMap to your domain and simply put a link to it. The WikiEngine will render the linked life into the page where the link is. Collapsible elements, icons, colours and all.. I just couldn't consider something else.

In this article about the competition between Microsoft and Lamp, Wikka is mentioned as one example for free software solutions running on lamp.

I think commitment is a mark of character and the prerequisite of success with any meaningful goal, and I would just like to give one more nod to the developers of Wikka Wiki for taking an active interest in my satisfaction with their product. Wikka Wiki has my vote for “wiki engine of the year.” It is truly The Little Wiki That Could. A powerful little tool that comes with a full set of features and a development team that is working hard to make it even more powerful and easy to use. [...] Wikka Wiki seems to be the perfect solution for what I need to do. It has an RSS capability which allowed me to display my delicious links to Wikka’s relevant support pages and create a custom support page; allows users to lock down any pages that they create, limiting read, write, and comment privileges - which may appeal to people doing educational research for a variety of reasons; presents a very simple interface and allows for categorization of content, making it easy to search; displays images, flash files, and also supportsFreeMind mind mapping software. There’s more, too. Take a look at the full feature list.

I have been running OpenWIKI (which sits on ASP and MSSQL). While it is great of of the 'box', it lacks file-uploads and features for handeling code snippets. Wikka a GPL, PHP, MYSQL wiki with much stronger features for formatting, attachments, and code snippets.

...Die Engine macht soweit einen recht flotten Eindruck, das Programm ist nicht übermässig gross und hat alle Features, die man so braucht. Nachdem es auch MySQL als Datenbackend nutzt, ist es zudem recht flott. Was es bisher leider noch nicht gelernt hat, sind Locales, damit ist die Benutzerführung bisher nur auf Englisch möglich. ...

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