Yes, I am actively researching this on my own, but what kind of Doper would I be if such research didn’t include picking the brains of the Teeming Millions?
I want to propose the concept of a wiki as a viable collaboration/communication solution for a non-profit organization. I have grand visions of the great and wonderful things that could be made possible for this org using wiki technology and implementation such as I’ve used in the for-profit corporate world. I’m a moderately experienced wiki end user who knows just enough to be dangerous, but not enough (yet) to make as profound and compelling a pitch as I desire. A former employer of mine used a corporate wiki with an employee base of 2000+ (domestic US), and my current employer uses a much larger and elaborate wiki system with an employee base of 14,000 (world wide).
I don’t yet understand what is required to build, host, administer, and protect a “closed” wiki. But before I jump off of that bridge, I want to create (on my own domain/hosting account) a small set of sample wiki pages where I can demonstrate the core concepts and maybe a few of the advanced bells and whistles.
Does anyone have any recommendations or tips towards this endeavor?
The easiest setups will sit on a LAMP or WAMP server (Linux/Windows OS-Apache Web Server-MySQL database-PHP scripting). For an easy to use Linux server, use SME. There are all-in-one setups for Windows, too. Once you have that basis, there are lots of wikis to try.
Take a look at OpenSourceCMS - they have set up lots of CMS and Wikis to look at and play with to determine your needs. Once you have found something that you think may do the job, download it, set it up on your AMP server and test it.
SME Server is good (and I use it for mail and file services here), but for an easy LAMP setup, Ubuntu server is easier (IMO), because it sets up the LAMP stuff by default - I’ve been playing with it on one of my test machines this week and I set a PHPBB message board in about two or three simple command line operations.
Excellent. Thank you. I’m at least familiar with LAMP as a Product/Project manager, so it sounds like this little project might have the added benefit of making me more informed as to what my developers are actually doing in their dark cubes late at night.
Will the LAMP platform also be all that would be needed to host say, a WordPress blog and simple web-based ticketing system as well? I think this group would benefit from a combination of all three.
I asked one of my developers at work today if he could give me any pointers for my little extra-curricular project. He said that he “hates wikis” as far as them being his favorite least favorite thing to work with professionally, but agreed that it should be just the ticket for the non-profit’s use case.
I don’t work for this organization, but my Mom does. I’m a passionate supporter of their environmental and educational efforts, and have been since I was very young, when my parents and members of the community first started the group.
Anywho, when I told my developer that I was also interested in pitching a blog, ticketing system, and possibly a message board as well as a twiki, he suggested I look at the offerings of & [url=]http://joomla.org. I haven’t read through their sites yet, but he was under the impression that a LAMP server would be all that either would need.
I’ve dusted off an old IBM Thinkpad of mine that I plan to re-purpose for this endeavor by installing ubuntu and turning it into a LAMP box. It is currently running Windoze 98 and only has 32 MB of RAM at the moment, and no ethernet port, but those are easy enough to pay someone to upgrade/add.
Those that frequent the ubuntu forums seem like fine folks.
