By shivams on

We are developing an open student network for our university. Essentially, It'll be a wiki with many more functionalities, e.g. forums, hierarchy in user roles, university map, opinions on courses etc. We are considering three options:

  • MediaWiki (or any other wiki CMS)
  • Drupal
  • Python based (Django based, Plone)

Our prime requirements:

  • It should have wiki like features (or should be extensible to such) e.g. versioning, easy linking etc.
  • It should be extensible for having forums
  • A flexible permission/role management
  • If possible, it should be extensible to whatever needs may arise in future. [In this regard, I've heard Django would be better since it keeps a cleaner code which is easy to handle.]

Kindly compare the three options: Wiki CMS, Drupal, Python based CMS. Also, I'm a bit skeptical about wiki-like functionalities in Drupal. Will it be able to convert into a full featured wiki?

Comments

john_b’s picture

john_b commented

Many people here have not used the other frameworks much or at all, and all are pretty loyal to Drupal!

Drupal.org has a lot of book pages which work like a wiki. You may also want to check out the following Drupal contrib modules: Content Locking; Workbench; Skill Compass. The latter is new and looks very interesting.

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors

shivams’s picture

shivams commented

Thanks for suggesting the modules. They are perfect for my needs.

However, I am a bit skeptical about whether Drupal can actually be used for a wiki. Could you give me some example where Drupal has been used as a wiki? I did see some posts where people suggested modules for wiki but I was not very satisfied with the available modules.

john_b’s picture

john_b commented

I don't know any, but I have read posts here about it, so I can do more than google. As said, the documentation pages of drupal.org are publicly editable by members, are moderatable, and do include a revision history, so that basic functionality is here on this very site, although the styling is different from wikipedia, as d.o. is not using the tabbed menu. I guess it depends on what defines a wiki...

The Drupal wiki profile (distributed with various modules already included) linked here http://drupal.org/node/356583#comment-1191626 does have a sample site http://www.thebigwiki.com/

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

It all depends on how you define 'wiki' -- it is whatever you define it's features to be. Wikipedia itself defines a wiki as "a website whose users can add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor." which of course drupal can do.

That said however, if you define wiki as mediawiki funcitonality, there's nothing there that couldn't be done with drupal. Using mediawiki will pretty much limit you to that feature set-- it's not nearly and extensible and flexible as drupal or django.

Personally, I liked plone but found it difficult to work with and much harder to customize. Django also excellent, requires too much work-- it's strictly a framework so you have to create it and maintain it all yourself.

I find drupal to provide the best balance between framework and product which means you can avail yourself of all the thousands and thousands of modules already available and still create your own, easily maintained, functionality whenever necessary.

shivams’s picture

shivams commented

Thanks guys for your suggestions. So far Drupal is looking the most appropriate solution. However some of our developers are insisting to go for Django. I for one would like to go for Drupal. Anyways, let's not divert.

Let's see if we indeed develop our platform in Drupal, we'll share it with you. We're currently testing Drupal for our purpose. If it suits our purpose, we'll go for it. And share whatever themes (and modules probably) we develop during the course.