Recently I was working on creating a website for which my client wanted a wiki (in fact, really a knowledge base. We’ll come back to this later).  The budget in this case was nil, which might lead you to suspect that “you get what you pay for” and nothing useful would be available.  As it happens, that’s far from the truth.

Initially I investigated “Mediawiki” and while that is VERY powerful wiki software (it runs wikipedia after all) it was far more complex than my client needed or desired.

The basic requirements were:

• Full integration with WordPress site
• Ease of Use in writing / creating content
• Ease of ongoing maintenance / updating.
• Free Support
• Easy to Learn

An attack on Google led me to this useful blog post which in turn led me to the excellent, and free, Yada Wiki plugin by David McCann.

Yada Wiki meets all of the requirements mentioned above, and does so admirably.

You can learn more about Yada Wiki and how to use it, in this video:

Oh and I promised I’d come back to the difference between a wiki and a knowledge base.

A wiki is a website on which users collaboratively modify content and structure directly from the web browser.
The example most people are familiar with, wikipedia, would have millions of contributors.

A knowledge base, while having a technical definition (a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system, as opposed to a database) is often thought of as a like a wiki, but with a limited number of users or admins creating the content for consumption by others. This was the use case for the site I created for my client.

Cheers all.