[Instiki] OT Soks...

[Tom Counsell]

On 18 Aug 2005, at 19:54, naiznoiz wrote:
> And now a smile comes on my face... I thought the diversity tree  
> would and at Ruby(->Rails)->Instiki, but I'm wrong. How does  
> Instiki compare to Soks? Only the fact that Instiki is (being)  
> written in Rails? I care less about whether it is text or database  
> based. Which wiki is more popular and used, in your opinion? (don't  
> want to start a discussion on this on the reflector, just an honest  
> anwer). Which wiki is more supported by a group of developers?  
> Don't get me wrong on this one, but from an active group it is  
> easier to learn.

Instiki is more popular, more used and has a larger group of developers!

Soks was written to scratch a set of very personal itches* during a  
bad patch in instiki's development a year or so ago (it wasn't being  
actively maintained because Rails had taken off and David hadn't yet  
got Alexey in to take over, it wasn't easy to hack, the madeleine  
storage had issues, and the transfer of its code to the Rails  
framework delayed the introduction of some useful features, like file  
uploads).  As such Soks has a few tricks and useful bits that makes  
it great for me and a few others, such as the fact that it can  
support multiple visual look and feels more easily, can do file  
uploads, can do automatic summaries, automatic linking, calendars,  
import rss feeds, import mailboxes etc etc etc...

Now that Alexey has sorted the transition to rails I expect that  
instiki will start gaining features rapidly and become one of the  
best wikis in any language, not least because Rails is such a handy  
framework.  I hope so, because one of the things I appreciate about  
open source projects is that diversity = inspiration and sources of  
good coding ideas!

Tom
* One of the biggest of which was to learn to code ruby.