wiki wiki me

There has been a bit of a buz regarding the use of wiki's in an office environment. I'm trying it out currently as a quick non-official documentation system. We have four different products in house, two of which are based on roughly the same source tree (at least originally they were). There's a small group of developers working on the various projects with a good deal of overlap. More often than not one person per project is the major knowledge repository for a given project. All of that critical knowledge in one place, with one interface, that's generally called a single point of failure. If that person is out and something needs to be done, then things are held up. Beyond that if the question is trivial, the person with the knowledge is interrupted. Interruption is the bane of productivity, at least for me it is. There is nothing more annoying than being "in the zone" and having someone interrupt you for some simple piece of knowledge. Which is where the wiki comes in. Hopefully it will provide me with a way to document my designs and choices forcing me to revisit and possibly refactor.

I ran into some trouble setting the wiki up initially, because apparently no one really cares to run these under windows. I've got phpwiki running on a windows xp machine running IIS 5 and php 5 (as an isapi dll) using mysql as a database. As of the writing of this post the current release version (1.3.10) does not work with that configuration. A cvs "snapshot" is your only option, some experimentation was needed to get the configuration to a usable point (the configuration UI does not work). If you want to take a shot at it I also suggest enabling all of the error logging in php. I'm still attempting to discern whether or not versioning is actually working. If I can't sort out versioning in the next day or so I'm going to check out TikiWiki which seems to be a little bit overkill for my purposes.