Got some more opensource ‘toys’ to play with

Since last week, I’ve decided to sample a few more apps to inhabit the arseneault.ca domain. The everlasting quest for the perfect wiki may be coming to an end as I’ve taken a look at both phpwiki and pmwiki. phpWiki just took forever to unzip, with close to 10Mb of content, which seemed on the large side to me, for a php-based app (considering what it does, and that several wikis only need a few lines of code to run).

pmWiki on the other hand, was reasonable, although it used flatfiles instead of MySQL to manage the entries. Nevertheless, that’s the one I’ve installed and I can say this is the first wiki to make it very easy/obvious how to lock everybody out but me for editing (I know, I know .. that’s not what wikis are meant for…)

In addition, the author takes extra cares in that updates don’t overwrite your customizations. With more than 200 add-ons (they’re called cookbooks) available, this wiki package sure has an active community. Another nice surprise: skinning/theming is fully supported, and more than 30 themes are available for download from the website. With instructions on how to install, customize and extend with those cookbooks mentionned earlier.

So for now, the wiki is pretty much empty, I don’t wanna stress myself with it as I did with the previous one. Content will show when it shows. I also tried out Sitebar, which is a bookmark synchronizer using a self-hosted php-based server software as the master repository. It support all browsers through various integration points (Firefox extensions, shell extensions, bookmarklets, etc). Again, this one is on trial on my machine, I’ll see if I can adapt to the way it works, and if it’s intuitive enough that it can become second nature.

Finally, I’ve just finished installting TortoiseCVS, so I could checkout the latest cvs tree of Scuttle, and get some of the fixes which haven’t made it to a build yet, but were commited to the tree. No, I don’t have any hope of modifying the code, but it’s just cool to get the bleeding edge, as opposed to the latest stable builds – yawn…. boooring… 🙂