There are many wiki engines. The most famous is MediaWiki, used by Wikipedia. MediaWiki has lots of features, high performance, high scalability, and a huge community. However, managing a MediaWiki installation is not simple: the content is spread over dozens of MySQL tables, making backup and recovery cumbersome. Also, some updates require lots of manual steps.
In contrast, docuwiki doesn't need a database to work. The pages are stored in plain .txt
files, in a sensible directory structure. So it's trivial to backup – I can even do it with git
. And it's also simple to write scripts to create or edit pages automatically.
There are other wiki engines that store pages in plain text files. But among the ones I saw, docuwiki is the one that seems to be more widely used and supported. For example, it has lots of traslations, including Brazilian Portuguese, my native language.
After I had made my choice I found a tweet by Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) which pretty much nailed it:
We use @DokuWiki for https://t.co/SeGL1Bi7Fp - easy to manage, upgrade and backup
— Rasmus Lerdorf (@rasmus) September 29, 2017