MediaWiki Wiki CMS Review

Wiki based Web Content Management systems are present almost everywhere but mostly people don't know when they are using one. If you ever used Wikipedia, you have already used a wiki system. A wiki is described as a documentation database that can be edited by number of users simultaneously. Wiki systems are mostly used for providing product documentations by many open source software authors as well as corporations. As of yet, Wikipedia is the largest application that uses the wiki format. The wiki system that Wikipedia uses is called MediaWiki.

MediaWiki is a free and open source wiki based content management system which has been released under the GNU general public license so anybody is free to obtain its source code, modify it to his own liking without paying any royalties to anyone. It is designed in PHP programming language and uses MySQL database at the backend to store its data both of which are open source and free as well. It is extremely powerful and so scalable by design that it can run on server farms that get billions of hits everyday by its users. As being a wiki based system, contents are organized in categories and is indexed with keywords, which makes it very easy, efficient and fast to search with its built in search engine. One of the features that makes it immensely easy to use is the use of WikiText which is a specialized XML based format designed for it. It lets users edit the content of the Wiki without learning any XML or HTML programming. Users are presented with a what you see is what you get editor where they can edit Wiki pages full of rich media like text, graphics, multimedia files and much more.

The wiki pages in MediaWiki support versioning and hence if by chance or by intention if some changes are made to the wiki data which are not approved, these can be easily deleted and previous contents can be restored without any problem. This is especially helpful in the cases where your wiki system is hit by some spamming software or human spammers. The interface of MediaWiki is fully customizable using both rich editing tools as well as by editing configuration text files manually by the administrator. Skin support is also there which in sense, is similar to the template systems used by other CMS systems. Using this system, the interface of the Wiki can be fully transformed without hurting any functionality.

The system is fully documented, using the MediaWiki itself. Apparently, not much is needed to be said about the MediaWiki system as it speaks for itself. It’s one of the most sophisticated and powerful Wiki CMS systems available today.