Creating Wikis

Professional Wikis
by Mark S. Choate

List Price: $39.99
Paperback: 300 pages
Publisher: Wrox (December 26, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0470126906
ISBN-13: 978-0470126905

Book Description: The success of Wikipedia has proven just how effective wikis can be for collaborative editing on a large scale-larger than anyone originally thought possible. This book shows you how to install, use, manage, and extend a wiki using MediaWiki-the wiki engine used to power Wikipedia.

As each chapter builds on previous ones, tasks involving wikis progress from simple to those of increasing complexity and evolve from theory to case study. You'll learn wiki terminology and how to create user accounts and new pages, use wiki links, and find your way around the wiki. Special focus is placed on how wikis are used in software and web development projects and how their capabilities ideally suit a specific environment and audience. You'll quickly come to discover why wikis are a valuable addition for any organization that wants to increase productivity using web-based collaboration tools.

What you will learn from this book

• When to use wikis instead of a more formal content management system
• What to look for when evaluating wikis in order to avoid unexpected pitfalls
• How to install MediaWiki using Apache, PHP, MySQL(r), and other alternatives
• How wikitext allows you to edit content from any web browser and create links to other wiki pages
• Ways to comment on pages, move them, track changes, and syndicate wiki pages with RSS

This book is for programmers, developers, information architects, designers, and content authors who are looking to use wikis to improve team productivity. Knowledge of HTML, XML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, and PostgreSQL is necessary.