Are there any wikis that can be skinned with html/css/images? We've gone through the process of getting custom html for a blog (wordpress) and for our app and would like to be able to use those designs with a wiki.
Mediawiki is fairly flexible to skin, with a bit of effort. A guy called Paul Gu in Canada has made a few for example. Some other MediaWiki skins and galleries:
paulgu.com/wiki/Mediawiki_Skins
mediawiki2u.com
mediawiki.org/wiki/Gallery_of_user_styles
Mediawiki, the Wiki software used by Wikipedia, is skinnable.
TWiki has many skins that are CSS based:
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SkinPackage
Try embedding a dooWiki into one of the pages that you want skinned. It's just SaaS for HTML publishing and so it takes on whatever CSS you give it.
Related
I am at present building a medium-sized educational website containing text, academic articles, blog, audio book excerpts, mathematical demos, etc., using custom CSS styles. I am leaning toward two ready-made solutions:
django-cms; and
textpattern.
I have ruled out WordPress because customization is not so easy. Joomla is overkill for this website and the table based design it uses is against my philosophy.
Because I have a number of years of experience in django, django-cms seems to be the natural way to go, but textpattern has more out-of-the-box features and is well supported.
What are the pros and cons between django-cms and textpattern based on prior experience of the people on this list?
Many thanks.
For a comparison of CMSes the best site I have found so far is:
http://cmsmatrix.org/matrix
Over 1200 CMSes are listed and you can compare CMSes by clicking on the checkboxes provided this helped me make my decision and ended up turning back to one of the popular CMSes namely WordPress.
Because I have a number of years of experience in django, django-cms seems to be the natural way to go, but textpattern has more out-of-the-box features and is well supported.
django-cms also has a lot of features from plugins and are well supported too.
django-cms is a fine software which even has it's own hosting site. If as you seem to suggest, the only reason you are looking at textpattern is because it has many out-of-the-box features, then you should really go the natural way with django-cms.
I'm a fan of Textpattern and have been using it for years now. It's benefits are its simplicity and light-weight making it perform well. However, these might be an issue for you if you are wanting to build different content types. Textpattern's interface treats all article content as the same (unless you start install a load of plugins to tweak this). This is fine if your site is primarily for articles, but from what you've said in your question I suspect not.
It is really simple to download and install; so I'd recommend giving it a quick look to see what it can do for you.
A project I am working on makes extensive use of CFCHART. We have run into quite a few usage and performance issues with CFCHART, so I have been tasked to look at some third-party solutions to try out and recommend. Anybody have some reviews and recommendations they'd care to share?
Consider outputting the raw data and using JavaScript / Canvas to generate the charts on the fly. The load is the given to the client.
This makes it easier for screenreaders and people who like to save the data to access it as well.
Some JS charting libraries:
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/
http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/
http://code.google.com/p/flot/
http://codecanyon.net/item/graphup-jquery-plugin/108025?redirect_back=true&ref=1stwebdesigner&clickthrough_id=23945276
http://www.highcharts.com/
Not dependent on your server side technology (e.g. irrelevant to the fact that you're using CF), I have recently started playing around with HighCharts (http://www.highcharts.com/), and have been very impressed.
Bear in mind, it's not free for commercial use, but you didn't specify as to any such restrictions. Although their pricing seems pretty fair (see http://www.highcharts.com/license)
The Wijmo jQuery library has some nice charting widgets. http://wijmo.com/
We use FusionCharts. They have a comprehensive set of chart and widget types (eg sparklines) and have a very slick, professional finish.
ChartDirector is reasonable and is very advanced. It generates image-based graphs and we don't have to worry about whether or not different browsers support various advanced HTML features or Flash. You can download it, install and run it unlicensed and it will only add a little copyright in the bottom-right 20 pixels of the graph. (Licensing is inexpensive.) It comes with 239+ ColdFusion scripts so that you have plenty of sample code. Their support forums is very active and helpful.
http://www.advsofteng.com/cdcoldfusion.html
Check out the gallery. It has some very impressive samples. You can create just about anything.
http://www.advsofteng.com/gallery.html
You can try jqChart as well.
Thank you to everyone for these suggestions! This gives me a good list of applications to work with. Since there is no one "right" answer for a question like this I made sure to note each answer as useful.
I am looking for a blogging and comments system that can smoothly integrate with my Django sites. I've found there is a lot on the Net and got lost a bit, and I don't have much experience on this. Hope you guys can give me some suggestions.
Here are the things that I would like to have:
Tag Clouds
Articles Archive (by months/by years)
Articles Rating (e.g. with Stars or customize icons)
Comments to the particular Topic/Articles
Sub-Comments of a particular comments (i.e. following up comments)
Blogs/Articles Searching
Able to relate other articles that is relevant (i.e. follow up Articles)
Pagination of the comments if get too long
OpenIDs supports (e.g. facebook, hotmail, blogger, twitter...etc)
Support login before user can comments
Able to retrieve Blogs' Header and customized the display order
Able to subscribe this article to RSS
Able to Email this to friends (this may not belongs to the comments system)
If I missed some common functions, please let me know. The comments system I am looking for should do most jobs that those popular comments system should do on the web, e.g. WordPress.
Thank you so much everyone. Have a nice day.
I myself really like django-threadedcomments. It supports threaded commenting like what you would see in Disqus.
i heard django-comment-utils is quite good. - may you test it :)
I am currently working on a website and i kinda need something like a cms/site builder to be integrated int the site, but not very complicated.
for example let's say i have a few templates and the users can modify them as they please(add a picture, some text, etc)
Please help.
Thank you!
look at N2 if you are working in .Net http://n2cms.com/
try joomla, drupal, or wordpress. There are also some basic wiki sites that are easy to setup and use like TWiki.
If you want to keep things very basic then SnippetMaster is an option. Your users can edit odd bits of text and even add pictures. It works best for sites with only a few pages to update. For a large site you may want to look at something more advanced.
You can build a site these days with WordPress. Actually I recommend this even if you have more complicated stuff. There are a lot of plugins and themes and over all support. If you want something simple you can have it in minutes.
You could use Joomla (PHP) or Windows SharePoint Services (.NET), but it depends what kind of thing you are really after...
Also, you could use something like VS Web Developer 2008 Express edition which'll create a basic template for you.
Here's an awesome link that I just happened to have someone send me yesterday:
Top 10 free content management systems for web site designers
We're in the middle of deploying a new software system to lot's of users in lot's of places (200+ users over 8 countries). In the past we've written a manual for the users, then update it every so often. This works ok, in that all the users ahve the same manual and it covers the main things but it has it's problems, like it doesn't get updated that often, we sometimes miss updates, and some users will have old copies.
We've been talking about using a wiki during the testing and deployment phases to build a knowledge base about the system. Ideally we'd then like some way to convert that into some form fo electronic document that we can then 'pretty-fie' and send out as the official manual, as well as letting users use and update the wiki.
Has anyone else done anything similar ? Any suggestions for wiki systems, workflows, document formats etc?
Most wikis support export via PDF e.g.:
MediaWiki PDF Export
DokuWiki PDF Export
TWiki PDF Export
You can write something that generates LaTeX from the wiki and renders a manual to PDF. With packages like hyperref you can retain cross-references as hyperlinks.
Additionally, you can integrate content from multiple sources such as a data dictionary into the LaTeX document, which can be mixed and matched with the wiki content. You could also set the architecture up so it can support cross-referencing that goes either way.
Framemaker could also support this using generated MIF files, and you could also use Lout in a similar way or convert your wiki content to docbook, which would allow you to use any of the many rendering options available to that format.
As an aside, the following Stackoverflow postings discuss various systems for maintaining documentation.
Application (Not a Markup Language) for Producing a User Manual
Can LaTeX be used for producing any documentation that accompanies software?
What tools are used to write documentation?
What tools does your team use for writing user manuals?
How best to write documentation (ideally in latex) targeting both the web (html) and paper (pdf)?
Best tool(s) for working with DocBook XML documents?
What is the recommended toolchain for formatting XML DocBook?
Is a successor for TeX/LaTeX in sight?
Madcap Flare is a help-and-manual authoring tool that uses HTML for the source of each topic. You could pretty easily do a mass import of the Wiki pages. Would then require some cleaning but after that you have a nice single-source system that can output CHM, web-browsable help, PDF, DOC/DOCX, etc.
How are you storing the help source at the moment? Is it MS Word files, MS help, LaTeX?
If you put your help source files under version control then you will get all the benefits of a wiki without having to migrate to a new system - people can make edits to the help files easily - those changes can be tracked, reverted etc. and you get the prettified manuals as before.
I followed Node's links and came across some mediawiki pages that I thought were noteworthy.
Extension:OpenDocument Export
Extension:PDF Writer
Category:Data extraction extensions
I gave a previous answer which may be useful for the "wiki to PDF" part -- look at using the open source PediaPress code or functionality. You can get ODFs from it too, although their PDFs are already quite pretty (but you might want to rebrand it and restyle it for your company I suppose).