Alfresco As Wiki

[wfischer75]

Hey – basically I am looking to be able to use Alfresco as a wiki. I know that it is possible to integrate Alfresco and Mediawiki – but it seems like one is able to only edit pages in Mediawiki and they then show up in the Alfresco wiki space.

I need the reverse functionality. Is there any way I can use Alfresco to create a series of web pages that can be searched and edited? My goal is to use it for documentation for our department. My heart is not set on Mediawiki. I just need some way to publish to web straight from the Alfresco web client. Does WCM do this? Please advise.

Thanks!

[jbarmash]

You are right that the MediaWiki integration is currently pretty one-way.  We'd welcome contributions to expand capabilities there. 

WCM would help in some cases, although it's a bit more about XML-based content that can later be read by whatever web technology you have. 

If you can provide a bit more context, I might be able to suggest a better approach. 

> Is there any way I can use Alfresco to create a series of web pages that can be searched and edited?

You can do this out of the box - html is text, which is editable in alfresco.  It does force you to know html, which I suspect you (or more precisely your end-users) would rather avoid, which is why you are looking into Wiki.

[wfischer75]

jbarmash:

Thank you very much for the reply. You asked for more context, so here I will try to provide more detail.

Essentially, I am looking to create a series of pages that describe, very simply, in plain text, some of the more common tasks that employees carry out daily in my dept. Basically a knowledge base.

We currently use Mediawiki for this, but I would rather bring everything under the umbrella of Alfesco. I would like semi-technical end users to be able to edit and "publish" these documents so that others could read them later on. I would also like to be able to link the pages together with hyperlinks to create sub-pages, etc. I could certainly create an HTML template to use an editable "base."

Is this possible in Alfresco? Is WCM necessary? What would you suggest? Many thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

[jbarmash]

I see.  Well, WCM should fit the bill here.  It gives you the exact separation that you seem to be looking for - you can have your people author pages on the authoring side, and then promote it up to a staging environment (sandbox) for review.    We have a concept of sandboxing, which allows each author to have their own view of the current content.  They can make changes to one ore more file, and then promote them as a changeset for review / approval / publishing.

I'd suggest you try to create a website, create an XForm with a text field, and play around with the whole site concept.

Once you have a bunch of XML documents, you can then create renditions off those XMLs to display them to the user in whatever way you want.  

This is a good starter page:
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/New_Web_Content_Management_Plan

The only real question here is how light-weight of a process do you need.   Alfresco will work nicely, but it's a bit more heavy-weight (intentionally) than some other systems out there - both in terms of setup and use, which don't really require an approval process or tight security - they allow any user to publish content on the website.