The blog’s been up for a couple of days and I’ve got my first comment … how exciting! Thanks Gunther Dippe.

Since the last blog I’ve spent quite a lot of time researching tools to use for our knowledge base, FAQs, etc. I’ve looked at about 5 different CMS systems (Drupal, Mambo, Plone, etc). But they’re all a bit over the top for our needs. So I started looking more into wikis.

We need something that is:

• simple to customise the look and feel
• supports security (so no just anyone can update pages)
• make editing pages and articles easy
• allows our resellers to translate the pages
• needs to be hostable by our provider without a DB

That cuts down the field considerably.

I downloaded and installed about 6-7 different wikis, that were mostly powered by PHP (which we can run on our web servers). I ruled out most due to their dependence on a database, and others because they were hard to customise the look. I also really hate the look of wikis WhenAllTheLinksOnTheirPagesLookLikeThis. In the end I decided that a simple wiki called pmWiki was the way to go. It’s simple, configurable and it works!

Within about 20 minutes I had it up and running and looking just like the main Papercut site. It needs a little bit of tweaking, but not much.

It’s going to make creating great documentation easy, which leads to higher quality docs and satisfied customers. (Hopefully!)