PodWiki 0.8.4 review

PodWiki is a collaborative Web-based authoring tool written in Perl which differs from other WikiWiki tools in that it uses Perl POD

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Thomas Linden

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PodWiki is a collaborative Web-based authoring tool written in Perl which differs from other WikiWiki tools in that it uses Perl POD as its markup language.

PodWiki by Thomas Linden uses Internal Link PerlPod as its markup, which is an established language for documentation in the Perl community and well known world wide. PodWiki enhances POD a little to circumvent some lacking features (such as images or includes).

Beside POD, it also understands a shorthand markup which writes like natural text and is very easy to understand for new users. If they need more features they have to use POD; for simple pages Internal Link WikiShorthand is enough. Internal Link WikiShorthand is the default markup if nothing is defined otherwise.

PodWiki supports includes, graphics, version control (via RCS), diffs, merge-back, user/group authentication and authorization, page property inheritance, variables, attributes and a lot more. The user can use so called "formatters" to insert plain HTML or text content, which is very useful for a stylesheet or example C code. There is also a formatter for Perl code available which makes it possible to create interactive PodWiki pages (note: for security reasons this feature is turned off by default).

The big difference from other Perl WikiEngines is that PodWiki is 100% customizable, since the whole wiki site is driven by the include feature. PodWiki always loads one page ("AutoLoad"), which includes the other stuff, such as the Header, Stylesheet, Menu, the Content-Area, Edit-Bar, Footer and so forth. This allows the user to fully modify PodWiki's look-and-feel.

If you are using Apache with mod_perl you can speed up PodWiki. It's fully mod_perl compliant.

PodWiki supports Internal Link authentication by users and groups. Nevertheless it is possible to work with PodWiki unauthenticated. In this case you will be logged as user anonymous. Pages can be protected for reading and/or writing for either one or more groups or for a single user. If you dont want to be logged as anonymous: Internal Link register.

Beside all those features it is still very easy to install, no need for lots of additional Perl modules or cryptic installation procedures. Just do:

./configure & make install

The configure script understands some parameters which allows tweaking the installation such as destination path or the like.

What's New in This Release:
A blogging feature was added, which enables users to use the wiki as a blog or as a blog with wiki capabilities.
An RSS feed for blog pages is also supported.