Professor Geek

Over the past few weeks I have been setting up wikis for my students to use during the spring semester that begins tomorrow. This has been a long process of identifying software, installing and configuring it, and learning how to use it. Of course, I have to do all this before I ask my students to do it, so it has been a rather intense few weeks.

Bottom line: I tried several packages, but couldn’t get them to work on the server space I have at my university. The main reason was because I didn’t have enough execution memory allocated to me. As I researched this, I found out that the amount I am allocated on my university server is almost exactly the same as most people get on their hosted servers, so unless I wanted to run this on my own server (where I have complete control), I would have to find something a little less intense that could be run within the parameters I have to work with. My only real requirements were that it had to be open source and run on my system. It was then that I ran into pmWiki. This software is great for small wikis.

pmWiki

This software is great for small wikis. It uses its own data structure, so you don’t need MySQL to run it. Further, its memory requirements are far lower than other packages. Finally, it is extremely easy to install and administer. It is php-based, so it uses scripts to do everything (making it platform independent). It has a large enough user community that the support is good and the documentation it already has is excellent. Thinking about setting up your own wiki? I set one up for myselft (private, password protected) to keep track of all my technical notes. Then I set three of them up for my classes. None of the installations ran into a single hitch. This is excellent, easy-to-use software that lets anyone set up their own wiki for whatever purpose they desire at virtually no cost and very little muss and fuss. My kudos to the developers.

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