In my wiki roundup post I complained about DokuWiki’s reliance on plugins, but after scouring the landscape of FOSS wiki offerings nothing else offers exactly what I need. So I settled on DokuWiki with a bunch of plugins. I have plugins for tagging pages, moving pages, blogging (which I use as a place to quickly catch ideas as they come to me before pushing them to the wiki proper), listing orphaned and wanted pages, among others.
The reason I initially disliked the idea of relying on plugins are that they may interfere with one another, interacting with the different plugins is inconsistent, and updating and management become more complex. But like I said, they get me what I need.
On the other hand, I’ve also been working with BookStack for another project. In many ways it’s the opposite of DokuWiki. It looks modern, it has a noob-friendly wysiwyg editor (important when you need people of different technical skill levels to use it), and tries to be “batteries included” in the dev’s words. The problem it’s missing some features I consider essential for a wiki, chief of which is the ability to link to nonexistent pages. There isn’t really a centralized way to manage uploads, either. And since it isn’t extensible, you’re stuck with those features unless the dev decides to add them later.
So I can see why people may prefer one approach over the other, but how about you?
Since I am a fan of blender I most likely have to vote for the first one. However it was kind of a blessing when many of the features that had to be installed as add-ons before now is a part of the plain software. They tend to implement all of the very popular ones, as a part of the standard program. I think people would lie if they didn’t love everything working right out of the box, so we don’t have to spend time on configuration and more time on actually creating.
This sounds like a very sane bit of both approach.
Support plugins so anyone can extend however they like, but integrate the most popular plugins into the software.
I like it.