RE: CMS vs. Wiki

I think Darrel said he was looking for an off-the-shelf Wiki in .NET .
I don’t have any to suggest Darrel but I do have a word of warning.
 
I’ve been using Wikis for about 7 years and although they’re great for
small teams of developers, they aren’t good for proper documentation.
When a system is as free form as a Wiki, it becomes up to your
contributors to ensure consistency and when you’re coding away and just
trying to update the thing so other devs know what you’re doing, you
aren’t really concerned about consistency.  So eventually, after a few
months, it becomes really difficult to find what you need unless someone
spends a lot of time making sure it stays clean (fun!).  A Wiki is a big
notepad that everyone can write in.  It can eventually look like a wall
full of post-it notes.  I suggest structuring the doc based on your
architecture and delegate sections to team members.  Your in house CMS
is actually probably better for it than a Wiki.  But then again, if
you’re like 2-5 devs, you probably don’t have to worry about it.  Just
think about what the end product will look like for a dev that’s never
met you or your team.
 
Another solution you might want to try Darrel is some of the auto-doc
stuff you can find for .NET.  Basically interprets your code and allows
you to write doc on a per object/function/member basis.  I think you can
find it on Sourceforge.  Anyways, you know all about me and my obsession
with structure…
 
a+,a.
 
André Milton – CTO
 
mLore Inc
 <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]
(514)395-4455 x 2
Use the cube :  <http://www.mcubes.com/> mcubes.com
 
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2005 2:54 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [CMS] CMS vs. Wiki
 
I don't really understand why you would want to reinvent the CMS wheel
but not the Wiki wheel when there are many good tools available and a
custom Wiki seems much easier/less risky.  Sitecore (the pure .NET CMS
vendor which employs me) provides a free Wiki module exposing CMS
content in a Wiki format.  It's low-end, but you could probably add
whatever Wiki features you need.

All the best,

   -John

Austin, Darrel wrote: 
Yes, Wiki's are excellent for collaborative, multi-faceted
documentation. 
    
 
Since we're now on this topic...is anyone familiar with a ASP.net based
WIKI
system? We've actually been working on an in-house CMS and I'm thinking
a
Wiki would be perfect for our internal developer documentation.
 
-Darrel