TWiki Advantages

I thought that I might record reasons why I, Andy Glew, have used TWiki in the past, and why I am considering installing TWiki to replace my almost 2 year old installation of Mediawiki at Dreamhost.

When I started using Dreamhost, I decided to try Mediawiki, largely because of the one-click installs, and automatic update. However, Mediawiki's limitations are becoming so onerous that I am about to switch back.

• TWiki has access control.
  • You can set up TWiki so that certain pages or groups of pages are restricted to certain users.
    • although there are Mediawiki extensions for this, Mediawiki itself warns against using them
    • there are undoubtedly bugs in TWiki's access control. But it was good enough for Intel and AMD.

• TWiki's access control makes it easier for several wikis to share a fixed address, so that SSL (http) can be used

Because of Mediawiki's lack of access control, I have had to set up differnt subdomains for each sort of access. But if you want to use SSL, you need to pay for differehnt access for each.

• TWiki is file based, not database based

many folks consider this a disadvantage, but...

• • file based means you can get an additional level of security by using setuid scripts
  • file based makes it easy to replicate to a different site, or to have a private experimental version
  • file based means that many tools are available for ad-hoc experimentation and editing. E.g. global renames are a sed script