Wanna WordPress Wiki

The following guest post was written by Ryan Hellyer who operates PixoPoint.com While you’re there, check out his WordPress Template Generator You can also catch him in the Tavern forum under the username Ryan.

Have you ever tried using MediaWiki, the platform used to power the mighty Wikipedia project? If you have, then you will have noticed how difficult it is to work with.

With the advent of Post Revisions in WordPress 2.6, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to convert WordPress from a blogging platform into a Wiki platform.

The bright folks over at Instinct Entertainment, makers of the WP e-Commerce Plugin, have released the WordPress Wiki plugin which converts an innocent WordPress blog/site into a Wiki.

Installation

Simply copy the Plugin files to your WordPress plugins folder, activate it in your admin panel and the plugin will add a checkbox to the end of your posts and pages editing panel. When checked, the post or page in question will be given ‘Wiki functionality’.

WordPress Wiki admin panel view

How it works

Once you have chosen a page or post to have ‘Wiki functionality‘ it will display a list of post revisions on that page or post. You can then click any of those revisions to revert or edit the Wiki.

WordPress Wiki post view

How useful is it?

This plugin does not offer the shear flexibility of a full-blown Wiki system like Media Wiki, Wikka Wiki or any of the other common Wiki software out there. However, it does offer a number of advantages due to being built within WordPress including:

Easier integration within blogs

Easy theming with the WordPress theming system

Huge array of existing plugins and themes

Simple installation

Very well documented core software

Wiki software is still a specialist area of web development. Whereas blogs, forums, CMS’s etc. are all heavily used across the internet, Wiki’s are much less common and suffer from lack of development because of this. Hopefully the new WordPress Wiki plugin will help make it easier for more people to add a Wiki to their own site.

What will you use it for?

Beyond the obvious uses as a simple Wiki system using WordPress as the backend, do you think there would be a use for such a plugin in a traditional blog? Post your replies in the comments.