Revision [9556]
This is an old revision of KoG made by KoG on 2005-06-24 00:33:31.
At first I wasn't sure Wiki were going to be useful, but I realize that unless I wanted to write my own project, or use what I had been using (Apache Forest) I was probably going to have to use a Wiki. I was familiar with sites like Portland Pattern Repository, PInvoke.net and several other (diverse) wiki applications. I did some quick research, late at night and obviously not paying attention, and thought MediaWiki was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Well, yeah, it was - compared to the other pieces of Wiki junk I'd used and it was cool. But it had all these annoying things, and the configuration file was just way too complex for what I wanted. I wanted something with ACLs (although, I kept hearing the word and thinking Active Directory for some reason... - JavaWoman helped me overcome that) and little required pages. Oh yes, not to mention that the MediaWiki editing guidelines is a blank page! Yes, Wiki aren't supposed to have many tags in their markup, but I had to search for the tags and that was quite annoying.
I was sitting on Freenode and I ran into JavaWoman - a very nice person, and also most persuasive. I like the way Wikka looks, the way it works and the fact that the dev team are all nice and passionate people. In their defense I'm sure the mediawiki folks are, but they seem more intimidating in the fact that they're the great Wikipedia yadda yadda yadda... It's been awesome and I'm hoping to hang around for quite some time.
Why Apache Forest was wrong
So, this is my quick rant on Forest. It's awesome for code and whatnot, and I love the tags (reminds me of the Gentoo handbook). I hate the indexing system, and the tabbing (navigation tab) system. It's just too stifling, and it's heavy because you either need to run the process, or run the server internally. I don't really want to run either an extra server, or to statically render my pages every time I update them. Running a live editing server and then a static release server for documentation seemed a little offputting too.
Now, in their defense Forest is a new project and it's really, really cool. I suggest people take a look at the apache projects. Still Wikka was light enough and does the job admirably.
