No doubt, wiki is one of the best way for content collaboration and we have our mighty Wikipedia as the unshakable example.

The current company that I worked with, G Element, is using MediaWiki, the free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia, as its intranet knowledge base system.

The main drawback of MediaWiki is the content permission control. If happened there is something confidential or sensitive information that you may not wish to reveal to everyone inside the company, then you may have problem.

Despite MediaWiki is designed for easy content collaboration in mind, it is not intuitive in term of usability. Users may have some hard time to actually get themselves familiar with the wiki style markups. For non tech savvy or administrative people this could be a pain process to learn markups.

I been looking for alternative replacement of MediaWiki that capable to give me the permission control over content as well as better user interface with integrated wysiwyg text editor. Since I am a Drupal developer, I realized with the contributed modules that available in Drupal community, I could implement a wiki-like content management system. After analyzing the requirements, I have make a list of selection for required modules.

The secret recipes that we needed are:

• WikiTools
• Diff
• Freelinking
• Table of Contents
• Image Resize Filter
• FCKeditor/WYSIWYG API
• Coherent Access

Nice to have toppings are:

• Printer, e-mail and PDF versions
• External Links
• Notifications
• Private Upload
• … (up to you)

With the above modules installed in Drupal, we could have a content collaboration tool that closed to MediaWiki and yet have endless possibilities with contributed modules.

For example, Notifications module could let you integrated with messaging service such as SMS. A notification message will be dispatched to your mobile once a particular page you tracked is updated by someone. This could be pretty handy when you are away from your machine.

I am currently using the above solution within my project team. It served as the knowledge sharing and collaboration tool between my partners and my teammates. It works pretty well so far. Everyone is happy!