One of the most interesting interactive technologies (and perhaps the fastest growing) is the wiki system. Under a wiki system, users post contributions, and then subsequent visitors can edit or augment this content. The most famous example is Wikipedia, which is a user-generated encyclopedia. Any user can post a new entry, and then the system will track changes made by the users.

Although Joomla operates as a CMS and can readily accept new content from contributors, it was not designed to allow a large number of people to make minor changes or modifications to content — exactly the functionality provided by a wiki. There are several good offerings of Joomla extensions that add wiki capabilities to Joomla, including OpenWiki and WikiBot.

OpenWiki
OpenWiki provides a bridge to encapsulate the PHP application DokuWiki within the Joomla system. It features a complete ACL implementation that builds on the Joomla ACL for groups such as Super  Administrator, Administrator, Manager, Author, Registered, and Public. ACL permissions include create, edit, read, upload, and delete.

OpenWiki has a number of useful features, including the following:

❑       Simple, standard wiki syntax for article formatting

❑       Unlimited page revisions with diff support to show colorized differences between past revisions

❑       Rich text support, including image embedding

❑       Optional CamelCase support

❑       Automatic index generation with full text search capabilities

❑       Quickbuttons and access keys for fast editing

❑       Breadcrumbs link tree for easy navigation

❑       Spam blacklist

❑       Designation of read-only pages

❑       Support for more than 30 languages

❑       CSS templates that allow customization of presentation

❑       Custom plug-in architecture (with more than 100 plug-ins already available)

❑       Generation of RSS feed for content

You can download OpenWiki here: 

http://projects.j-prosolution.com/projects/os-projects/project-openwiki.html

Install the component through the Extension Manager as you would install any other component. To add the JEvents calendar to the front end of the site, create a menu item that connects to the component. The component is self-contained, so all interaction and administration occurs of the underlying DokuWiki itself occurs through the front end. Configuration of the OpenWiki hosting is performed through the com- ponent’s administrative interface.

DokuWiki, upon which OpenWicki is based, doesn’t write the wiki entries into a database for dynamic creation of content. Instead, the pages are generated as static files. Therefore, to use OpenWiki, the application must have write permissions within the site directory structure. It relies primarily on the fwrite() and fopen() PHP methods, so be sure to establish if these are activated on your Web server before you attempt installation.

In the Joomla Administrator interface, you can open the OpenWiki Configuration Settings screen through the OpenWiki option in the Components menu. The interface allows you to set up not only the permissions but also the parameters for content creation.

WikiBot
WikiBot bridges Joomla with the free encyclopedia Wikipedia. Words can be tagged in Joomla content to link to related articles in the encyclopedia. This tool makes it extremely convenient to bridge content on your Joomla site to the large Wikipedia database.

You can download the WikiBot here:    www.theinevitabledossier.com/wikibot.html

Install the plug-in through the Extension Manager as you would install any other plug-in. You will need to publish the WikiBot to enable it for automatic handling of article content.

WikiBot performs completely in the background to the Joomla site. Simply add the necessary tags directly into the body of a standard Joomla article. Words are tagged the same way they are cited in a Wiki by enclosing them in double square brackets like [[these  words]]. WikiBot supports international language tagging. Additionally, links within articles are possible with [[article|linkname]] notation. Placing the double brackets around text in a content article will display a Wikipedia link when the page is viewed.

Words tagged with the double brackets do not appear as links in the preview window but only when viewed through the front end.