anyone have recommendations for good, super easy to use wiki or documentation software or services?
i have a team of non-technical folks and want to gather the onboarding and reference docs for them. probably less than 30 pages of stuff, so mediawiki is heavy-handed (and a bit ugly), but google docs is a bit messy and i have to send invites, etc.
what tools do you all fancy for team stuff?
@valerauko that looks interesting! thanks!
@pixelpaperyarn Gitbook can be cleaner, and just better because it's basically a git repo, but less user-friendly for non-tech people.
@h that's interesting. my team doesn't need to do much editing, but i want them to be able to so i don't know if i want to through git at them. but i'm sticking this in my back pocket anyway. thanks!
@pixelpaperyarn You're welcome π
@pixelpaperyarn i too want to know :)
EtherPad has recently come to my attention, but haven't actually tried it.
@woozle @pixelpaperyarn etherpad's pretty heavy and doesn't organize docs tho :\
@amphetamine @pixelpaperyarn could create index doc, I think
(on mobile, else would be more investigative)
On further thought, Etherpad Lite might be more what you're looking for:
"an almost complete rewrite of the original Etherpad software, based on different technical foundations and written by different authors. While the original Etherpad is written in Scala[citation needed] and has quite demanding system requirements[citation needed], Etherpad Lite is written in server-side JavaScript using node.js."
@webmind my server does have that installed. it's a little clunky looking but might do the job.
@pixelpaperyarn there's some good themes for it
@webmind oh! i'll dig a little deeper then.
@pixelpaperyarn perhaps look into TiddlyWiki if you want something that doesn't need "hosting" (you could publish it to a shared drive, for example).
@pixelpaperyarn moinmoin is a light(er) wiki, written in python, easy to set up and tweak/configure.
@pixelpaperyarn Our internal documentation is (mostly) in a moinmoin wiki. It's okay...
Lately I really have been fantasizing about a git repository full of <markup language> files, since the browser as intermediary is really superfluous for us...
@pixelpaperyarn last time I needed this kind of thing it ended up being mediawiki because it was the only wiki that normal people can halfway use so it was the best choice even though it is huge. was a few y ago, tho.
@halcy yeah, it's already on my server so it's the easy choice. at this point i'm wondering if since i only have a few pages and it's not something that'll be constantly growing, i might just find a better way to organize my google docs better.
@pixelpaperyarn At $dayjob we use Confluence. I keep my notes in a personal Tiddlywiki that I copy into GDrive at CoB every day. At NASA we used Mediawiki for everything.
@drwho @pixelpaperyarn You worked for NASA?
@ajroach42 @pixelpaperyarn NASA Goddard, 2008-2013.
@pixelpaperyarn I use tiddlywiki a lot. It is very light weight. It is best when you only have one person who edits it though.
Will the non-technical folks only read the documentation? Or do you want them to be able to contribute to it as well?
If the former, you can write your docs in rst (or markdown) with Sphinx, then push on Read The Docs. http://readthedocs.io/
Sphinx has lots of themes to make it pretty, but the default isn't ugly anyway.
It's not as easy as a Wiki (the markup syntax, git, ...) which makes it harder for non-technical people to contributed, though. π
@pixelpaperyarn Or, even simpler: do the same thing but publish with Gitlab Pages.
@pixelpaperyarn
As much as I love open source, Confluence if you can afford the price tag is super nice to document on (besides from having their own template engine, why not markdown?)
Dokuwiki / Google docs / git wiki are all acceptable.
I've found the problem at $dayjob is the linking of each page and where & how they all integrate. Having a table of contents / main page with links to all, makes all the difference.
@ticoombs i *wish* i could afford Confluence.
table of contents doc for the google docs is a good idea!!! hadn't thought of that.
almost everyone is so non-technical i really hesitate before throwing new tools at them.
@pixelpaperyarn dokuwiki + tinymce plugin. Mediawiki needs a VPS with 2 Gb or RAM, Dokuwiki doesn't even need a database.
@pixelpaperyarn how about https://kibe.la/en ?