David's Tech Blog

On the old version of my site I had a page about a module I wrote for Drupal 4.7 that added a filter using the PEAR Text_Wiki package. At the time I wrote it, there were no other good options for wiki markup in Drupal filters. I used the module on several sites, but I didn’t release it on drupal.org because I didn’t intend to maintain or support it over the longer term.

Since then, other people have created modules to provide wiki markup and other wiki-like functionality to Drupal. There’s a PEAR Wiki Filter module, which does basically what my module did except is maintained and has versions for Drupal 5 and 6. There’s also the new Flexifilter, which looks very promising but doesn’t have a “stable” release yet. And of course the Wikitools module goes a long way toward integrating wiki-like functionality into Drupal well beyond just markup.

I’m not sure if I was picking a product specifically for wiki that I would choose Drupal. Drupal is an excellent CMS and community collaboration tool. However, wikis are really their own thing, and there is quite a bit that wiki software does normally that has to be pieced together back into Drupal, making it work differently than it really is designed to work. I think that Drupal is the leader in what it is good at. That doesn’t make it the solution for everything.

On the other hand, if you need to use Drupal for some other reason, or if you have a Drupal site that needs some wiki functionality, take a look at the modules I mentioned. I think they will do the job better than resurrecting my old module.