Some of ikiwiki's features:
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Rather than implement its own system for storing page histories etc, ikiwiki simply uses subversion. (It's also possible to write support for other systems, and ikiwiki also includes support for Git now.)
Instead of editing pages in a stupid web form, you can use vim and commit changes via svn. Or work disconnected using svk and push your changes out when you come online.
ikiwiki can be run from a post-commit hook to update your wiki immediately whenever you commit.
Note that ikiwiki does not require subversion to function. If you want to run a simple wiki without page history, it can do that too.
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ikiwiki supports pages using MarkDown as their markup language. Any page with a filename ending in ".mdwn" is converted from markdown to html by ikiwiki. Markdown understands text formatted as it would be in an email, and is quite smart about converting it to html. The only additional markup provided by ikiwiki aside from regular markdown is the WikiLink and PreprocessorDirective
If you prefer to use some other markup language, ikiwiki allows others to be added by plugins.
support for other file types
ikiwiki also supports files of any other type, including plain text, images, etc. These are not converted to wiki pages, they are just copied unchanged by ikiwiki as it builds your wiki. So you can check in an image, program, or other special file and link to it from your wiki pages.
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Arbitrarily deep hierarchies of pages with fairly simple and useful LinkingRules
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You can turn any page in the wiki into a blog. Pages matching a specified GlobList will be displayed as a weblog within the blog page. And an RSS feed can be generated to follow the blog.
Ikiwiki's own TODO, news, and plugins pages are good examples of some of the flexible ways that this can be used.
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You can tag pages and use these tags in various ways.
Fast compiler
ikiwiki is fast and smart about updating a wiki, it only builds pages that have changed (and tracks things like creation of new pages and links that can indirectly cause a page to need a rebuild)
valid html and css
ikiwiki aims to produce valid XHTML 1.0. ikiwiki generates html using templates, and uses css, so you can change the look and layout of all pages in any way you would like.
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Automatically included on pages. Rather faster than eg MoinMoin and always there to help with navigation.
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Well, sorta. Rather than implementing YA history browser, it can link to ?ViewCVS or the like to browse the history of a wiki page.
RecentChanges, editing pages in a web browser
Nearly the definition of a wiki, although perhaps ikiwiki challenges how much of that web gunk a wiki really needs. These features are optional and can be enabled by enabling CGI.
User registration
Can optionally be configured to allow only registered users to post pages; online user registration form, etc.
Discussion pages
Thanks to subpages, every page can easily and automatically have a /Discussion subpage. By default, these links are included in the templates for each page.
Smart merging and conflict resolution in your web browser
Since it uses subversion, ikiwiki takes advantage of its smart merging to avoid any conflicts when two people edit different parts of the same page at the same time. No annoying warnings about other editors, or locking, etc, instead the other person's changes will be automatically merged with yours when you commit.
In the rare cases where automatic merging fails due to the same part of a page being concurrently edited, regular subversion commit markers are shown in the file to resolve the conflict, so if you're already familiar with that there's no new commit marker syntax to learn.
page locking
Wiki admins can lock pages so that only other admins can edit them.
Full text search
ikiwiki can use the HyperEstraier search engine to add powerful full text search capabilities to your wiki.
Commit mails
ikiwiki can be configured to send you commit mails with diffs of changes to selected pages.
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Plugins can be used to add additional features to ikiwiki. The interface is quite flexible, allowing plugins to implement additional markup languages, register PreProcessorDirectives, hook into CGI mode, and more. Ikiwiki's backend RCS support is also pluggable, so support for new revision control systems can be added to ikiwiki.
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After rather a lot of fiddling, we think that ikiwiki correctly and fully supports utf8 everywhere.