I need a blog. No, a wiki. Or something.

June 20, 2007 9:04 AM

I need a blog or a wiki or a cms or a combination of same or something that doesn't really exist. Help?

I am trying to create a freeform thing (for lack of a better word). It will be a group of annotated links/entries/pages/posts (depending on how you want to think about it). Some of these will be annotated links to an existing page (a la del.icio.us). Some of them will just be notes about a text heading, rather than a link. I want them mixed together, with no structure. I want tagging, and I want the whole mess to be obviously and easily keyword-searchable. I want a group of 5 people to be able to edit/tag it easily.

Basically, I want del.icio.us but with the ability to have text entries. Or I want tumblr but with tags. I suppose I could do Wordpress, but it's such a pain to add all the links, and then it's just too...bloggy. And wikis seem too structured (unless I'm missing something). I have no need for these entries to be linked together.

I am likely being too picky, but if anything like this exists, I would be overjoyed to find it. I've read the ask.me posts about wikis and blogs, and I've not found anything. Any help would be appreciated.

posted by unknowncommand to computers & internet (17 comments total)

Also, feel free to suggest that I am out of luck.
posted by unknowncommand at 9:37 AM on June 20, 2007

You could do Wordpress+delicious. My husband uses a wordpress plug-in (I tihnk) to get a daily digest of his delicious links as a post in his blog. I can't raise him at the moment to find out what he uses specifically but I think it can be done with inline RSS. Then, you can just use WP to make your posts.
posted by Medieval Maven at 9:41 AM on June 20, 2007

A wiki is only as structured as you make it—to my mind, they're as unstructured as you can make a CMS, short of putting everything into a single field.

pbwiki.com (a hosted wiki service) allows you to add tags to a wiki page.
posted by adamrice at 9:51 AM on June 20, 2007

This wiki comparison lists several that support tags like Twiki. Wikisgenerally offer multiple views, like Most Recent Changes, or Random Page, and it's a basic feature that they're exactly as structured as you make them.

The blog software with which I'm most familiar, Movable Type, could do everything you say -- give all 5 people equal access to edit entries; enable tagging; edit the templates to strike the date and author info, and include a link on each entry to edit the entry.

Unless I'm not getting something important about what you want, this shouldn't be so tough.

On preview, I repeat adamrice almost word for word...
posted by Zed_Lopez at 9:53 AM on June 20, 2007

So the thing about wikis is that I don't want a main page, or at least a main page with links to my entries. I've messed with pbwiki, and looked at their samples, and this seems to necessarily be the case.
posted by unknowncommand at 10:02 AM on June 20, 2007

What is it you do want as the main page?
posted by Zed_Lopez at 10:08 AM on June 20, 2007

Yeah, I'm w/ Zed - I'm not sure what you want it to look like. BTW the way to use delicious (I finally found out) is to log in, and then it's under settings and blogging.
posted by Medieval Maven at 10:15 AM on June 20, 2007

ExpresssionEngine has blog, CMS, and wiki features.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:19 AM on June 20, 2007

What makes wordpress too bloggy?

It seems to me like you could do what you want with a custom template that cuts out a lot of the metadata around posts.

There are also plugins that provide a simplified posting interface.
posted by Good Brain at 10:27 AM on June 20, 2007

Huh. That is an interesting question. Ideally, it would just be a search blank and a tag cloud. Essentially what I would like to do is be able to do a keyword search and it will return annotated links for what I want at site:whatever.com, but also it will return relevant text entries. Or the same thing, but from tags.

I am probably just being lazy or too picky with the wordpress thing. I was hoping there was something less clunky or big, or that would return lists of results (like Google or del.cio.us) rather than huge entries.
posted by unknowncommand at 10:28 AM on June 20, 2007

And we could just include more keywords to make the blog results more brief and meaningful. Maybe I will do that.
posted by unknowncommand at 10:30 AM on June 20, 2007

I should add that Wordpress lets you create static pages too, though it looks like they can't participate in any tagging or categorization.
posted by Good Brain at 10:33 AM on June 20, 2007

CMS search features are commonly configurable to return only titles (or other parts) of resultant entries, or excerpts. I'd be surprised if any of the systems named so far offered seeing the whole entry as your only option. It's still looking to me like Twiki and its bazillion plugins like this could handily do everything you're describing.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 10:42 AM on June 20, 2007

I developed software that did exactly this, but just sold it to a company so it's no longer available ;-) However.. Drupal will do this with a couple of plugins (Taxonomy, mostly).
posted by wackybrit at 1:18 PM on June 20, 2007

I agree with wackybrit- Drupal is a good way to go. Hope you know PHP, though. I'm not sure if Taxonomy can handle a folksonomy.
posted by mkultra at 6:22 PM on June 20, 2007

A pox on you, wackybrit. I will look at Drupal, even though it is terrifying.
posted by unknowncommand at 3:38 PM on June 21, 2007

A good simple solution might be tiddlywiki.
posted by bkudria at 5:44 PM on June 21, 2007