Sometimes I think that having less choice is better than having more choice. It may depend on a person, but it can drive me crazy when I have too vast selection, and I have the need to make a choice. That’s true for all kinds of mechandise that I buy. That’s why I always look for the reviews, recommendations, and for a forgiving return policy.

I wanted a wiki for my site, as I find wiki a wonderful tool for collaborative development of ideas. I needed to make a choice, so I googled for wiki comparision tables, and reviews. I found several of them, and at first I chose MediaWiki as the most well known wiki out there. Well, after I have downloaded it and have taken a quick look around, it ticked me that it was way too big than what I imagined it would be. After careful investigation of the same comparison tables I put my finger on WikkaWiki that, compared to lots of other lightweight wiki tools is still being developed.

Installation was a breeze, quick and easy. I put a full copy of the distribution in a separate directory, and linked to it from where I wanted my wiki to be. I wanted several of them in different places and separate, and that way I was able to make that happen with ease. Everything happens on a single installation page, and after you have filled it with all necessary data, it creates the database tables for you, and initializes your wiki. The configuration file is put in the local directory, and you are free to modify it if needed.

Nothing is perfect, as you can imagine. For my installation, I wanted the wiki to be private, and for that I needed it to not allow freely available registration. There was no option to do that, so I had to hack the code, remove the registration part, and move it to a special administration page inside the wiki where I could create new users myself. Also, the defaults are set in the configuration file to allow public access to the wiki pages, and I changed it to allow registered users only. The most interesting (and somewhat disturbing) thing was that WikkaWiki creates a cookie when the user logs in, and that cookie is not linked to specific wiki, but rather to the host. That is, when you have several wiki on your site, once you log in to one of them, you get logged in to all other wiki automatically! I will see if I can fix that as that’s not quite what I want.