ComparingXWikiAndMediaWiki
From Shrubbery
- I've been using XWiki [1] for some time now. I even installed at work. I did this because XWiki uses Hibernate [2], and I wanted to show everyone that Hibernate is "real". XWiki also has a lot of nice features, and is a bit easier to work with in some ways. MediaWiki doesn't use Java or Hibernate of course, but it does come with some really nice features that XWiki doesn't have.
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Where XWiki wins:
- Slightly simpler wiki syntax.
- Reasonably simple installation.
- Put code in pages with Velocity and Groovy.
- Nicer printable output, PDF.
- It's a Java Web continainer application, so if you have Tomcat running already it's pretty easy to set up.
Where MediaWiki wins:
- Renaming and deleting pages is supported.
- The built-in search is useable.
- Math notation using LaTeX
- Page section editing.
- Lots of people know MediaWiki wiki syntax.
- Email seems to work (I never got XWiki e-mail notification to work).
- Page hit counts and all that work (I never got Xwiki stats to work properly).
- 'minor edits' feature.
My Opinion
Well... I've only used MediaWiki for a little while, and it does seem to be better in day to day use. I really do miss the PDF functionality of XWiki, but it seems like most folks don't use that too much (it's as if they don't even see the little PDF icon! I don't understand people sometimes). As of this writing I'd say that MediaWiki is probably a better choice.
Update on XWiki
Since I last installed XWiki, there have been some updates:
- XWiki now supports deleting and renaming
- Using the Lucene search plugin in XWiki you can get good search results
- Page section editing also supported since last year
Further investigation on the web
After I decided to go with MediaWiki at work, I found some articles about converting about converting from MediaWiki to XWiki:
- http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extensions/MediaWiki2XWikiExtension
- http://encodo.com/en/blogs.php?entry_id=73
Maybe it's time to switch back to XWiki?
