Looking for a wiki

I feel bad blogging for help, but...

We had an accident on the server that hosted our Pragmatic Programmer wiki. Since then, I've been looking for a hosted wiki solution—we've been divesting ourselves of servers over the last year or so, and I really don't want to bring another application back in house.

All I'm looking for is a reliable hosted wiki (either free or commercial) that supports Textile. I've tried Stikipad, but I'm not sure they're supporting it any more.

Any recommendations?

TIA

Dave

Comments

[Tim Case]

This appears handy:

Wiki compare site

http://www.wikimatrix.org/search.php

The search shows 24 wikis that support textile.

[Vinny Carpenter]

Hi Dave. My favorite Wiki, Atlassian's Confluence offers a hosted version where they'll take care of the server and care-n-feeding of the box(s) while you get any awesome Wiki. You pay by users and so you can get fairly decent deals.

http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/confluence/

[Tamal White]

My first thought was Stikipad, and they do support Textile: http://www.stikipad.com/tour/editing.shtml

[Geoffrey Wiseman]

I like Confluence well enough. I haven't tried their hosted service (http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/confluence/), but it certainly exists. Their wiki format is very textile-like, although I haven't attempted to assess if it's exactly textile, or just textile-like.

[Seth Ladd]

I have to say that Confluence is the best wiki by far. And they now offer a hosted option. It's very slick and very powerful.

[Dave Thomas]

Confluence seems to charge by the user. We have 1000's, as this is our public wiki :)

Dave

[Michael Knighten]

Hi Dave,

I manage hosted services at Atlassian. We're big fans of the Pragmatic books, and would love to see you using Confluence. If you wouldn't mind getting back to me via email with some details regarding usage, number of users/visits etc. we can talk about what makes sense for you.

Thanks!

Michael Knighten
mknighten at atlassian.com

[Ancor Gonzalez]

Yesterday I saw http://www.wikidot.com/

I've not tried it.

[Raymond Brigleb]

I don't think such a wiki exists, sadly. I wish. I've been using Stikipad, but they haven't pushed a feature in like a year, so we're also looking to move. For us, Textile is also a must-have, partly since all our wiki pages are already in Textile. I hope someone has a better idea, otherwise, maybe one just needs to be written!!!

[Evgeny]

Might as well try Confluence, especially when Atlassian people are willing to negotiate your needs.
Just my 2cc about how I love the work the folks at Atlassian are doing, and making such great products like Confluence.

[Ryan McGeary]

Our company and some of our clients use confluence. It's certainly powerful, but I don't recommend it to anyone as I feel it's an overkill solution. It has too many features that complicate the simple process of getting documentation out there. They also bastardized Textile in an effort to support their own formatting extensions.

I must be in the minority about Atlassian, because I dislike JIRA too. Again, it's anything but simple and has a mess of a UI.

Unfortunately, I don't have any good alternative solutions for the hosted wiki, but I wanted to express that I don't think Confluence is a pragmatic solution.

[Juan Maria]

Dave, I tried StikiPad and it might be useful. It's very simple and its hosting server works fine.

[Dave Thomas]

Juan:

Stikipad doesn't seem to be actively supported. I emailed them at the start of the week, and have had no reply.

Dave

[Marston A, SugarStats]

We use Stikipad and as much as I hate to say this, I can't recommend it for the reasons others have said regarding support and active development. Which sucks, because the app itself is GREAT. Very simple, easy to us.

I'm a paying customer and they NEVER respond to me. They had forums up for a while and they were simply FULL of bug questions and people having problems. Now it has mysteriously disappeared. It seemed that they have a very annoying and randomly occurring bug that wouldn't let new users login even though you had just created an account for them. Weird as I've never seen that with any other Rails app I've used.

I dunno what happened, when I first signed up a year ago I had good contact with them (There are 2 founders from what I saw). Plus they have all that great marketing jibber jabber about how much they support their customers and to email them as they promise to respond quick. It went all down hill from there.

I personally will take a look at Confluence. The next best thing I've seen to stikipad is PBWiki.com (Pownce and Twitter use them). Though they are much more expensive than Stikipad and some basic features aren't included (Like customizable CSS) unless you get the highest paid plan (Which is $999.50/year)

[Jason]

I am in love with Near-Time: http://www.near-time.net

[James]

Dave,

I know that you are wanting to get out of the server maintenance business, but what about starting an open source wiki?
Developing an Open Source project requires community, and you definitely have that.

If you were to sponsor a project, I am sure that your former students, (all of us) would be willing to add features and implement your tool.

There is definitely a need for a good rails wiki. The fact that stikipad is having problems is testament to this. It is based on DHH's own instiki. I2 is what is used for rails' wiki, but there is a need for a pragmatic wiki.

As Ward says, a wiki is "the simplest thing that could possibly work", a wiki should be the starting point for almost any information appliance. If you were to apply your own sense of editorial mojo, I believe that you would start a project that would give back lots to the community.

This might not serve your immediate need, but if you wanted to get out of the server business, I would trade an EC2 cluster node (and support it) for your willingness to start up a new wiki project.

[Ashkan]

Dave,
I strongly recommend MoinMoin. I use it in all my projects. It is very easy to use and still powerful.
You can extend it easily with a few line of python ;)

[Ashley Moran]

Nobody's mentioned XWiki yet. You could get one hosted for free last time I checked, and it's features are on a par with Confluence and TWiki.

[richard]

I think you've hit on a more important issue. Specially when taken into consideration with Andy's comments about working beyond your means. And maybe that's where this topic came from or at least when you decided to abandon self hosting.

There's a 50/50 chance here.... 50% says that you're right and your business will grow and there is no reason to have this function/process in-house. The other 50% is to say that you're business is growing beyond your ability to manage it and rather than get help, you're throwing out the bathwater.

My advice... make sure you know where the baby is at all times.

[Per-Olof Hermansson]

I can recommend www.assembla.com which is a Wiki with integrated functions such as Subversion repository, Ticketing, Trac, Blog (Mephisto), etc.

It is free with option to pay for more advanced features, and space. But the free is really good!

Per-Olof