Should I use wiki or blog software for my simple database?

November 8, 2006 12:03 AM

I'd like to build a publicly editable online database. Each record of the database will consist of images and a few bits of meta data and maybe some Flickr-style tags. I don't have the skills to build a custom database nor the money to pay someone to build it. Is a wiki the way to go? If so, which free (or cheap) wiki software do you recommend for someone with very little programming knowledge? If I remove the "publicly editable" requirement, would a plain ol' WordPress blog with tags be the cleanest option?
posted by Typographica to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Will this website earn any money? If so, you could hire a programmer and pay him with "sweat equity" where he earns a percentage of whataver potential earnings the site might make.

If its for your own personal use, a wiki might be a way to go. You might even investigate something like Backpackit.com.

Will your site host the images in the database or will it only maintain the image's URL (like an image hosted by flickr or hosted by imagehost for instance)?
posted by farmersckn at 12:33 AM on November 8, 2006

Money - yes, but not much.

Backpackit - forgot about that one, thanks.

Images - they could certainly be hosted on Flickr.
posted by Typographica at 1:13 AM on November 8, 2006

I just want a good database-backed table tool that fits into a wiki. The || infernal || tables || used by some wiki software are hard to edit when they exceed a dozen lines, and I'd like to get into thousands of rows, sortable and filterable not unlike how a webmail client lets you work with message headers. Such a thing doesn't exist?
posted by Myself at 6:16 AM on November 8, 2006

If images are the core of what this is about, you probably want to go with an image-gallery app. Wordpress might not be a bad way to go, and there are scads of image-related plugins for it, but WP is mostly intended to have one poster and multiple commenters; if you want to have a bunch of people with posting priviliges, it might get clumsy.

There is the old standby gallery app, Gallery plus many equivalents.

Finally, for a proper multi-user system, you probably want to get a full-blown content-management system with a photo-album plugin. I happen to be a fan of Drupal and it indeed has many different photo-album modules—including one that embeds Gallery in it. Note that installing Drupal isn't much harder than Wordpress (and may be available as a one-click install from your web host), but configuring it (setting up user roles, setting up your site taxonomy, blah blah blah) can take a while.
posted by adamrice at 6:21 AM on November 8, 2006