Please help me structure my wiki!

May 23, 2007 9:03 PM

MediaWiki + hierarchies: Can it work?

I am looking at MediaWiki as a department CMS, because a group at the institution I work at has added some code that handles both campus single-sign-on authentication and group-level control for allowing, say, staff and faculty to be able to edit (only) their own pages.

However, in my experience with MediaWiki, and wikis in general, the notion of a hierarchy is anathema to the wiki philosophy: every article page is an entity unto itself.

About the closest I've seen MediaWiki come to handling groupings of pages is via Categories.

Are there other ways and strategies for putting Wiki pages into a structured form? (I'd like to, say, put "undergraduate" pages underneath an "undergraduate" pages; likewise with "graduate" or "faculty" pages.)

I'm happy to consider alternatives to MediaWiki which allow hierarchies, can provide an interface that could be customized by a graphic designer, have an authentication component that can be swapped out, and some means to add an ACL (access control list) to allow gradated control over (hierarchical) sections.

Drupal does not appear to directly meet the last two criteria, from the modules I've seen, but if I'm wrong I'd appreciate any pointers.

posted by Blazecock Pileon to computers & internet (4 comments total)

You might like Twiki, which has both hierarchy and access control lists.
posted by b1tr0t at 10:13 PM on May 23, 2007

MediaWiki has subpages, which are hierarchical, in addition to categories, which aren't particularly.

If you're worried about ACLs and gradated control, I'd question whether a wiki is really the right choice for your CMS anyway.
posted by hattifattener at 6:58 AM on May 24, 2007

MoinMoin wiki pages can have parents, children, and even sibling links (which are represented as directories in the file system). There is an integrated ACL, and CSS will allow for custom interfacing, but I'm not sure about authentication.
posted by philomathoholic at 9:13 PM on August 6, 2007

Coming in late, but you might also try DokuWiki, which has hierarchical "namespaces" (basically directories) that help keep things organized.
posted by alms at 8:47 PM on September 13, 2007