Managing Sharing of a Knowledge Database

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Nov 3, 2013 at 11:13 PM

Garland Coulson wrote:
>This is a big decision for me as this is
>intended to hold a huge database of knowledge over time and it would be
>frustrating to build the knowledge base for a couple of years and then
>find I needed to change.

I don’t think that you can go wrong with WordPress. In the past years it has grown from a capable blogging platform to a fully fledged CMS with infinite extendability, plugins for everything one can imagine, and a huge support community, while remaining extremely user and developer friendly, even for people like myself who don’t want to go into coding if they can help it.

By contrast, there are so many wikis around and with so many variations of markup and operations, that I find the wiki concept has become a victim of its own success. Check this http://wikimatrix.org for a very good overview of features. Dokuwiki is an excellent option and has the advantage that it can use plain text files for storage, but it remains the work of a single developer, unless I am mistaken. If longevity is the deciding factor, MediaWiki might be a better option (and it also has a WYSIWYG plugin) but it is overall a more difficult animal to tame.

That said, for sharing existing knowledge which are often interlinked in very complex ways, the infinite flexibility of wiki unstructured organisation of material is hard to beat.

Nevertheless, I would suggest that you take a look at Plone http://plone.org Without going into details, I believe that it may be a strong contender. Again, you may check its features compared to other CMSystems here http://cmsmatrix.org