Initial Review of Wik.is Pro Account Powered by MindTouch's Deki Wiki
Submitted by kai on Fri, 2007-12-21 00:27. ::
I started to host tahoewiki.org on Wik.is with a pro account a couple weeks ago. It's powered by Deki Wiki which I first learned through ReadWriteWeb. Time for me to give a review.
Reasons for choosing Deki Wiki:
- It's open source
- It has a suite of widgets and web Services mashing up contents. The mashup features are important because I want to bring in contents from other sites into the wiki
- It has a lot of nice features
Reasons for hosting with a wik.is account instead of hosting on my own:
- I don't want to deal with the whole software installation and server maintenance on a VPS server
- wik.is is among the very few wiki services that let me use my own domain(this is the pro account feature)
- $60/year is pretty good deal
Good things so far:
- Things are pretty smooth. I customized the logo and picked a different theme. It has a couple of themes to choose from
- Whenever I send out a support email, MindTouch gets back to me pretty quick. Product manager Corey Ganser has been very helpful
- I also got helps from the forums at OpenGarden
- I can track traffic to tahoewiki.org domain with Google Analytics
Improvements needed:
- Can't update header tag to include meta keywords and meta tag required to verify site ownership to manage sites using search engine tools for indexing purpose(both Google and Yahoo require)
- Can't generate a sitemap file in XML. It automatically generates a sitemap file in HTML, but that's no good for search engine crawlers.
- Invalid API key errors when using any extension(eg: Google Maps) that requires a API key. This is because the API keys for wik.is are used instead of letting a user supply the API keys for his/her domain
- Usability issues
- When editing in HTML source code mode, there's no way to save. It's also not obviously that the save button is disabled. One has to switch back to WYSIWYG editor.
- Slow loading of WYSIWYG editor. The linking functionality in the WYSIWYG editor is cumbersome and slow
To summarize, my experience has been good so far with wik.is pro hosting. Keep up the good work, MindTouch.
