Wiki based website - Choice of technology

Question

I am willing to build a wiki-based website that would have some other features, namely comments, social sharing, video insertion, article rating and gamification. In a nutshell, something very close to the StackExchange's websites, but the pages would consist of a single piece article instead of a thread of questions implementing the footnote feature.

I have not coded a single line yet.

I am rather experienced with Grails, so I know Groovy and Java. I also know JQuery and a bit of PHP, but I can learn basically everything required. I will be the only one programming on the project.

My questions are:

• Which technology should I use according to YOU ? Should I use Grails as this is what I know best, and try to integrate a wiki technology within my app (if yes, which one) ?

• Should I start from an already existing wiki technology (WikiMedia, XWiki, TWiki, Moinmoin, ...) and modify it to integrate the features I need (gamification, comments, video insertion, article rating and social sharing) ? Once again, if you think that is the best solution, please quote a technology, and if possible, tell me why is this THE one.

Thank you very much for your help. I find it rather hard to choose, and ever harder to know which path is the right one to go. Any suggestion is most welcome.

Answer 1

I would suggest using MediaWiki for the following reasons

1. You mentioned a wiki-based website
2. It has lots of extensions built already for your needs (comments, article rating, sharing, comments)
3. Since you mentioned you know little PHP, you can also modify some of the extensions for your use.

Answer 2

MediaWiki has (via extensions) support for social sharing, video insertion and article rating, and not-great-but-okay support for comments. (Probably most other wiki platforms too - these are common enough features.) Wikia (a MediaWiki-based wiki farm who opensourced most of their custom code) has some gamification features, though I am not familiar with them. Also, MediaWiki has the advantage of having the most widely known wiki dialect (due to the popularity of Wikipedia).

That said, if you are going for minimal developement effort, I would look into adding wiki features to an existing StackOverflow clone before trying to add gamification, comment etc. features to a wiki.