One of the first things to decide was whether I wanted to host it myself vs going for a SaaS provider (eg SlimWiki, Wikia – free SaaS initially). Since I’m already self hosting my personal web site via WordPress, I thought I could continue with self hosting, as the existing server had capacity. The other thing about self hosting was that I had more control and didn’t have to create a SaaS account.
Requirements
Must have
Have access control (make pages private)
Support markdown
Have sidebar
Nice to have
Simple, easy to setup
Run as docker container
Integrate with drawing program
No database
Self hosted option
Initially I was trying to decide on the following:
I liked the look of Gollum, simple / clean, but it lacked authentication. I found a docker version that had single user authentication. Wiki.js looked fancier than Gollum, but was quite hard to setup (also looking for docker version). I liked how they used git as the data store. Eventually I settled on DokuWiki as it was more mature / stable than Gollum / Wiki.js. There were so many options / plugins that it should meet all my requirements (and future ones).
WordPress with wiki option
Since I already had a wordpress website, why not install a plugin for wiki functionality. This way, I didn’t have to install / backup a 2nd application. I could leverage my existing backup / restore process that already works. This was the key point for going with wordpress wiki.
Looking into some free plugins:
Not as easy to use as first 2, I think most of the features come in the paid version
Decision
I ended up going with Yada Wiki as it was simple to use and functional. Yada wiki documentationhere. I liked how easy it was to create new pages shown as red links when the page didn’t exist (wiki like). At first I didn’t know how to use it, and learning was slow going, but watching the video really fast-tracked the learning. Great video (middle of page), good job!! Understood a lot of the key features straight away. I was thinking that I’d start with Yada Wiki first, and if I had too many pages (or became unwieldy), I could always port to WP Knowlegebase as it had the nice summary main page built in & might be better way to organise large pages. We’ll see.
