Wiki technology allows no-entry-cost edition of documents making it possible for many people to contribute to the same set of documents. Such technologies are widely used for projects like Wikipedia, MDC, wiki.mozilla.org or for many projects at Wikia.

In case of MCS, Wiki can be a good place to start a community when you have a group of people who want to collaborate on the vision for your project, or can serve as a place where people can work on documents and statups updates for your community. In today world almost every project in the world is using a Wiki and we believe that your can benefit as well.

Because of its popularity we decided to stick to MediaWiki, as the most popular wiki solution in the world. MCS MediaWiki is a powerfull addition to WordPress or Drupal based website and will allow you to boost participation level accross your community.

This is an alpha release, and I mean it even more than in the case od WordPress. MediaWiki may be a solid wiki solution, but its definitely not easy to customize and theme, so we want to work more on making the theme better for some specific sections of the Wiki (like search or recent changes), but the big thing that is missing here is usability.

We deployed all controls that should be needed, but the UI of original mediawiki is far from being perfect and our theme tries to fix it where possible. I cannot call it a full success yet and I hope those who will want to deploy the theme as well as other usability experts will want to contribute to the project by finding ways to make the UI more intuitive for use.

Edit section

preview

You can see it live at http://mcs.labs.braniecki.net/mediawiki or download sources from http://hg.mozilla.org/webtools/mcs/file/tip/mediawiki/.

I am aware that MediaWiki 1.14 has not yet been released, but it’s already branched and will get there soon (while it contains some important improvements and our MCS Mediawiki is in alpha version. alpha versions are for people who know what they’re doing, right?)

So, feel free to test it and play around and if you decide to implement it in your website, consider upstreaming your changes so that everyone benefits!

Next is phpBB3 and Drupal

I will write a separate post about MCS, but as many of you know since Fx Summit, I’m working on the set of customized open source web apps that will make setting up a community website much easier. One of the webapps that will be offered is MediaWiki, and one of the features of all the tools will be support for OpenID. Using this on Community Wiki is just a first step