Apple Wiki

Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 12, 2016 at 11:58 AM

We haven’t talked much about wikis recently, so I thought I’d bring people up to date with our experience of the Apple Wiki included with the very modestly priced Apple Server package.

So dreadful are the reviews of the latter that I only installed Apple Server on a Mac Mini that is actually running a number of other apps with considerable trepidation. But Apple Wiki has interested me for a long time, and I wanted to see whether it was any good.

And in fact, the whole experience has been very pleasant. Please note that the only Apple Server function I’m actually using is the Wiki server; I’m not using any of the more complex options available. But the wiki is, as it happens, very good, and becomes the default web page for the machine as a whole if you haven’t already started to use the Apple Server web function.

You can create multiple wikis. You can serve as many users as you like. You can search wikis at speed. You can filter search results, or constrain them further. The formatting functions are comprehensive enough for us (and include support for tables). There’s a commenting function. There’s support for tagging. Entries are automatically updated with the latest date modified/author info. There is even a page overview (although not an actual navigation tree, but then this is a wiki). The admin functions are easy to understand and use.

The only thing I miss? Search hits aren’t highlighted in the actual pages (although they are in the Google-a-like summary that appears in the list of search results). But that’s a minor issue, really; only a couple of major wiki platforms highlight search hits in pages (DokuWiki and Plone); the rest - including the once impressive Confluence - appear to have decided that this isn’t a necessary function. We do run a DokuWiki wiki on our Synology NAS, as it happens, but Apple Wiki is much more pleasant to use.

In short, Apple Wiki is really rather good, and we’ve started storing more and more in-house data on it as we’ve gained confidence in its abilities. All for the very modest price of around GBP 25, direct from the Apple Store.