Lately I’ve been building, administering, and supporting wikis for our faculty at DePaul’s School for New Learning. When I got the gig, SNL had already contracted with PBwiki, so my experience has been with that tool. Recently, though, I needed to research alternatives for our grad program. I’ll briefly share some of my thoughts on PBwiki and two other wiki tools; then in a future post, I’ll follow up with an overview of three others.

 

PBwiki

Things I like about PBwiki

• Easy to set up.
• Clean, uncluttered interface.
• Easy, intuitive WYSIWYG editor and an HTML editor.
• Creating pages, links, and folders is a breeze.
• Easy to add users.
• Easy to set access permissions. Premium versions have page-level access functionality.
• Easily customized with your logo and nine preset color schemes. Premium versions of PBwiki can choose a color scheme based on your logo colors, or you can specify a custom scheme.
• Easy to add media with Plug-ins feature:
• Productivity: calendars, planners, Google gadgets, address link (opens a Google map) spreadsheet, stock chart
• PBwiki magic: equations, html, footnotes, recent changes and visitors, tables of contents, number of visitors
• Chat room
• Photos: Bubbleshare or Slide
• Video: upload file or embed YouTube
• Easy backup and retrieval of pages and files. Easy to revert to previous version of page.
• Extensive library of academic templates.

What I don’t like:

• Can’t add users by e-mail domain.
• Can’t set notifications at page level.

Overall, I like PBwiki. It’s easy to use and administer and has an excellent and responsive support staff and an extensive library of how-to videos covering everything from basic editing to advanced features. It doesn’t allow adding users by e-mail domain, something to keep in mind if you want to easily make a wiki open to a large population of users but still keep it closed to the public at large. It also doesn’t allow JavaScript on wiki pages, which precludes using apps like JS-Kit’s ratings widget. But it’s a solid, versatile tool, and if you’re looking for a free, easy-to-use wiki with a good feature set, you should give PBwiki 2.0 a try.

 

Zoho Wiki

Things I like about Zoho Wiki:

• Clean, intuitive interface.
• Easy drag-and-drop side-panel customization.
• Customize top panel with your logo and text, or fully customize in a WYSIWYG editor.
• Three wiki editing choices, WYSIWYG Advanced, WYSIWYG Basic, and an HTML text editor.
• Customize the advanced editor with the tools you want (or the tools you want your users to have).
• Easily add subpages.
• Sidebar navigation automatically populates links to new pages.
• Can customize the CSS.
• Easy to add users.
• Flexible access/permissions settings.
• Can grant permission by e-mail domains.
• Control copying ability of wiki contents.

What I don’t like:

• Limited color palette. Can’t customize unless you know CSS.
• Subpages don’t show as links in the parent page automatically.
• Difficult to embed media. Need to work in HTML to format correctly, because the editor doesn’t give visual indication of where the embedded media will appear. HTML embeds appear in front of drop-down actions menu, making editing or selecting functions an exercise in frustration.

My first impression of Zoho Wiki was positive; I liked the look and feel of the interface and the ease of customizing the layout. However, it’s a real pain to embed multimedia and there’s no gadget or widget library. I also hate that Zoho adds a one-pixel border around page elements that appears as you cursor over them; this is likely considered a feature by Zoho, but I find it a distraction. Overall, you get a good feature set for free, but the kludgy editor keeps me from recommending Zoho Wiki.

 

Google Sites

What I like about Google Sites:

• Free. Sign up with Google account.
• Easy, intuitive interface.
• WYSIWYG editor, HTML text editor, and preview function.
• Twenty-three free skins (site themes).
• Customize colors, fonts, logo, layout, layout element sizes. Great deal of customization possible; can customize the color scheme for a given theme.
• Editor lets you specify one or two column layout.
• Editor makes it easy to insert Google calendar, document, spreadsheet, Picasa slideshow, presentation, video from YouTube or Google Video, Google Gadgets, as well as basic html objects like tables and horizontal rules.
• Easy to add attachments and post comments.
• Easy to add users and set access.
• Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Get user data and make your site more visible to Google and users and increase traffic.
• Custom domain feature; for example, mywiki.depaul.edu rather than sites.google.com/site/mywiki.
• Preview page as viewer option.

What I don’t like:

• Cheesy free skins.
• Limited selection of page templates.

It’s hard to find something not to like about Google Sites. I love the ease of use and broad functionality, its integration with other Google apps is a tremendous advantage over other wikis, and I love the ability to easily change the layout. I like that I can choose to have a border around the video player without writing code for it; it makes it easy for noncoders to maintain a consistent and defined visual space for their embedded videos.

I find the twenty-three site skins a bit cheesy, but that’s merely a matter of personal taste; you could play with the settings and certainly find something to your liking. Google Sites offers more options, more functionality, more administrative features, more data resources, and more ease of use than other free wiki tools, and I recommend checking them out.

 

That’s it for this post. In a future post I’ll share my thoughts about Wikispaces, Wikidot, and WetPaint.