Ask HN: A simple wiki which supports Markdown syntax? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: A simple wiki which supports Markdown syntax?

I'm looking for a wiki which has the following features

* supports markdown syntax * Written in PHP/Python/Ruby/Java * Allows only authenticated and approved users to make edits (approved = all users have to approved by an admin) * Free

Mediawiki does support all the above with extensions but it is a beast :)

Even if a wiki doesn't support markdown, please do comment. I would like to know of all the alternatives. Any experiences with Docuwiki/TikiWiki/MoinMoin?

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Dokuwiki and pmwiki are both very nice, hackable, lean wikis.

I have a question on this subject, though. For a wiki (not a blog post, etc), do you guys prefer WYSIWYG, markdown, textile, creole (http://wikicreole.org/), or something else?

I prefer both markdown and WYSIWYG

Oh yeah, forgot about WYSIWYG. Definitely my first choice, but it can be very difficult and buggy to implement.

I really like Dokuwiki, and one big reason is that it uses plain text files to store content.

That makes it much easier to write tools to interact with content (e.g. grep for stuff, do backups into git, have scripts that check for certain content and send me E-mail, and so on).

Gitit rules; I don't know if it counts as simple, and it certainly doesn't count as "written in PHP/Python/Ruby/Java" -- are you sure you need that?:

"Gitit (http://gitit.net) is a wiki backed by a git or darcs filestore. Pages and uploaded files can be modified either directly via the VCS’s command-line tools or through the wiki’s web interface. Pandoc is used for markup processing, so pages may be written in (extended) markdown, reStructuredText, LaTeX, HTML, or literate Haskell, and exported in ten different formats, including LaTeX, ConTeXt, DocBook, RTF, OpenOffice ODT, and MediaWiki markup."

This is awesome and is something that didn't come up while googling. Is there a way to only approved users to edit the wiki? I didn't get that info after reading README

There are several ways to adjust access. The easiest way to limit editors is with the 'access-question' field in the configuration file; if you use the field, then the "question" must be answered by anyone setting up an account.

# Example: # access-question: What is the code given to you by Ms. X? # access-question-answers: RED DOG, red dog

See http://github.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/data/default.conf

Or see, e.g. http://groups.google.com/group/gitit-discuss/msg/e07fcabd70b...

On patch-tag.com (which hosts darcs projects) the gitit wikis are set up differently, with the natural default that they are only editable by members of the project. You might sign up there with an arbitrary 'test project' so you could try out the wiki mechanism. (Many users just use it for the wiki, apparently, though I can't point to an example.)

(The patch-tag gitit wikis are the only publicly accessible gitit wikis I've used regularly. I use a git-backed gitit wiki locally for everything; it's awesome because of the connection to Pandoc and the indifference between LaTeX/HTML/RTF output).

IMO, dokuwiki works fine. Reasonably easy to install as a Ubuntu package, has several authentication plugins. And it doesn't look ugly.

I’m the creator of Markdoc (http://markdoc.org/), which is pretty simple (bias bias bias bias) but it's just plain-text files in a directory, which means you’ll need to be comfortable with a text editor and a version control system.

On this topic, is there a good place to ask "does this exist?" where you'll get good answers. Like, when I'm about to start hacking on something, I'll Google around a little, but sometimes I find out after I start/finish that it already exists in a reasonably-good form. An Ask HN thread every once in awhile I guess would be ok, but it seems like overkill in many cases, especially if not many people would really be interested in the answer.

I guess ideal would be a piece of HN just for that that doesn't end up on the homepage, but some people would look over them once a day or so and see if they do know of something that exists.

If not many people are interested in an answer then it wont make the front page.

But that also means I won't have much likelihood of an answer. I want a place where some people who want to be helpful will see it even if not too many people care about the answer.

Perhaps Twitter and/or Quora are my answers

Stack Overflow and Server Fault are full of questions like this.

I don't think you can really do much better than Google. If the competitor/originator isn't on the first few pages, then you have an advantage even if you weren't the first one to make it.

If you're talking startups, I agree. But sometimes it's just some little library/tool that I need, and I'll spend an afternoon writing it and put it on GitHub if it doesn't exist, but if it does, I'd rather just use that than waste my time.

Ikiwiki uses markdown in plain text files, and can be configured to lock all pages and only allow specific users to edit specific pages (configuration for that would look like locked_pages => "* and !user(foo) and !user(bar) and !admin()"). It's written, unapologetically, in Perl.

It is used as the wiki for projects including Dragonfly BSD, NetBSD, GNU Hurd, Monotone, Cario, etc.

http://ikiwiki.info/

http://jottit.com does all this and more. It's a hosted solution, not sure if you're looking for something to install.

Instiki had all those attributes; it's certainly easier to set up than Mediawiki, but there has to be a more recent answer to this problem.

I looked at instiki, but it didn't seem like it had a facility where an admin needs to approve the users before they can edit. Is that the case?

Our very first revision of Playbook was built on Instiki, and if I remember correctly, it had user registration.

A colleague and I are currently working on Noted (http://notedwiki.com), which matches what you are looking for, except that we are planning on charging when it launches. It is currently in development, but we are going to be looking for beta testers soon, which may provide an opportunity for a free or discount copy.

Does anybody know of a markdown git-backed wiki?

Gitit (http://github.com/jgm/gitit) uses git by default. (But it now also supports darcs and mercurial: the darcs version is used by the wikis on http://patch-tag.com/ and, unsurprisingly, by the darcs wiki http://wiki.darcs.net/ )

ikiwiki (http://ikiwiki.info/) uses git (also supports svn, darcs, mercurial, bzr, monotone, etc)

http://dedawiki.dedasys.com does: Markdown, is written in Rails and is pretty simple to hack. It's available under the Apache license (BSD style, basically). It could use some work, but it does do what you asked, and is fairly simple to hack on if you need something more.

I wrote this one a while ago and still use it for my own projects. Written in Python, uses Markdown syntax, and is fairly easy to hack on and add features. Still haven't gotten around to adding decent version control though.

http://github.com/synack/nikiwiki

tptacek mentioned http://instiki.org which has all your features. It's a good wiki if you're happy with a Ruby solution, and Markdown/Textile formatting is native.

A PHP-solution is PmWiki, and getting Markdown support via plugin is outlined here: http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/MarkdownMarkupExtension

http://gist.github.com/363190

ruby lilwiki.rb

nice. was going to comment on it before you shoved it into a gist that you should gist it.

I wrote that in 40 minutes. Obviously you need to add stylesheets and some error handling.

Are you users computer programmers? If not, I'd suggest avoiding the need to learn markup languages. There are WYSIWYG plugins for most wikis.

This is the miracle of Markdown: everyone basically already knows it. I have read more than one story like this

http://atendesigngroup.com/blog/what-it-not-what-it-looks

where programmers thought Of course, these naive non-programmers will want WYSIWYG -- but in fact they preferred Markdown once they found it.

Really? I program and I've spent a while fixing non-obvious markdown errors. I believe that was the whole reason it was forked by markdownsharp. How would learning any language be easier than not learning anything at all?

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