I am a time management speaker, trainer and consultant. I would like to be able to share resources with my customers/members. I have written several ebooks, but they are difficult to keep up to date and distribute. I was thinking it might be better to have an online resource/knowledge database they could access instead. This way, everyone could access it and I could update just one place.

I am trying to decide what system to create it in. I have access to web designers and could do it in something like Wordpress, but I was thinking there might be a better way.

I use and love Evernote and do share some notes with people that way, but there is no way to properly order the notes within a shared notebook and the membership controls are poor.

I was wondering if a Wiki might be the best possibility to let me share online but also to control access. I was seeking your ideas on either a Wiki or another system that would work for this.

I should mention that I do not use markdown, I prefer WSYWIG so availability of WSYWIG is important.

I was looking at https://www.dokuwiki.org/ and was wondering if it might do the trick. If anyone has used a Wiki for public/members access I would like to hear your experiences with the systems you have used and any challenges you had.

Garland, I just checked the recent thread about viewers: You didn't bother to share some knowledge you undoubtedly must have about that subject, so...

Garland Coulson wrote:

I am trying to decide what system to create it in.

One question is whether you want to host the site yourself or not.

If yes, you could use an HTML editor, desktop wiki, or Wordpress.org.

If no, you could use a website builder service, wiki farm, or a blogging platform (Wordpress.com or similar).

Some website builder services:
https://iwantmyname.com/services/website-builder/

Some wiki farms (some of which have WYSIWYG):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_farms

I should mention that I do not use markdown, I prefer WSYWIG so
availability of WSYWIG is important.
I was looking at https://www.dokuwiki.org/ and was wondering if it might
do the trick.

DokuWiki does seem to require markup.
https://www.dokuwiki.org/wiki:syntax

22111 wrote:

Garland, I just checked the recent thread about viewers: You didn't
bother to share some knowledge you undoubtedly must have about that
subject, so...

Not sure what you mean by this 22111. What knowledge would I undoubtedly have that I am not sharing somewhere? What thread is it you think I am withholding knowledge on?

Thanks Dr.Andus

Dr Andus wrote:

Garland Coulson wrote:
>I am trying to decide what system to create it in.

One question is whether you want to host the site yourself or not.

I have my own hosting so hosting it myself is not a problem.

If yes, you could use an HTML editor, desktop wiki, or Wordpress.org.

I do a lot of sites for clients in Wordpress and love it. It is a possible solution and I know of good membership plugins I could use to control access. But overall, it just doesn't seem as intuitive as a wiki or Evernote notebook.

Some wiki farms (some of which have WYSIWYG):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_farms

Thanks, I will have a look at this.

>I should mention that I do not use markdown, I prefer WSYWIG so
>availability of WSYWIG is important.
>I was looking at https://www.dokuwiki.org/ and was wondering if it
might
>do the trick.

DokuWiki does seem to require markup.
https://www.dokuwiki.org/wiki:syntax

DokuWiki does have a plugin extension that allows WSYWIG. I have asked my designer to install it on a test directory on my site so I can play with it to see what I think.

Thanks again for your help. 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.

Garland

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

A very simple and pleasant solution is samepage.io, which offers a 10GB extranet for unlimited users for free. It's a great place to store documents, but also for collaboration. It's based on the (alas, now deprecated) Kerio Workspace, but is actually considerably more powerful. I'd suggest creating a free account and experimenting with it.

The company that runs it is Kerio, who have been around for a long time and produce various highly regarded software products (e.g. Kerio Connect).

MadaboutDana wrote:

A very simple and pleasant solution is samepage.io, which offers a 10GB
extranet for unlimited users for free. It's a great place to store
documents, but also for collaboration. It's based on the (alas, now
deprecated) Kerio Workspace, but is actually considerably more powerful.

Kerio Workspace was quite a unique tool: very easy to setup and use, as convenient as many cloud tools, but easily hosted internally at a small business environment.

Have they changed their business model for this product to service-driven? And how can one be certain that such a service will continue, when the product that preceded it was made redundant?

Correct - they disappointed many Kerio Workspace beta testers (myself included) by suddenly announcing SamePage while at the same time withdrawing the Workspace product. They did explain the strategy behind this (SamePage is built on technology that is substantially more scalable; Workspace is something of a dead end, apparently), but it still left a bad taste in the mouth. Not least because they had no intention of releasing SamePage as a downloadable application; they were determined to run it as a service.

Having said that, we still run Workspace internally, with Kerio's blessing, and it's still occasionally updated. SamePage is an ambitious project, and I would be surprised if they dropped it just like that; Kerio is long-term player in the software market. But there are no guarantees in the new ultra-fast-moving software world - just look at the furore engendered by Windows 8, or the current outrage over Apple's revamped iWork suite. Our own business is run on Soonr, a Dropbox-equivalent service optimized for business. So far, it's been impeccable. Will it always be so? I'd love to think so, but I'm not expecting any guarantees.

On the other hand, SamePage is easy to use. It's free, too, for up to 10GB of data (which is, despite all you may hear to the contrary, a lot of data!). It's easy-peasy to sign up. And it works very well - I've been running an informal SamePage account for several months now, and it's a pleasure to use. It's also easy to print out pages as PDF files. So if it does eventually go tits-up, does it really matter? The wise man preserves copies of data in any case - I don't keep anything in the Cloud that isn't also archived chez moi. Including e-mail (collected every hour by our MailStore server - our e-mail archives have already helped us on a couple of potentially embarrassing occasions). It's really a question of how you ride the wave!

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

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.

Thanks Alexander,

I use Wordpress for a bunch of different web sites of my own well as setting up sites for my clients. So I would consider myself a Wordpress power user - I also teach others how to use it.

I agree with you that Wordpress has really come into its own as a CMS. It might make sense to stick with what I know.

I did spend some time playing with Dokuwiki and it worked well. I think it could work but things like nested navigation and membership controls might be easier to manage in Wordpress as I already have solutions there. I will try setting up a stand-alone Wordpress site next and see how it looks.