In my wiki roundup post I complained about DokuWiki’s reliance on plugins, but after scouring the landscape of FOSS wiki offerings nothing else offers exactly what I need. So I settled on DokuWiki with a bunch of plugins. I have plugins for tagging pages, moving pages, blogging (which I use as a place to quickly catch ideas as they come to me before pushing them to the wiki proper), listing orphaned and wanted pages, among others.
The reason I initially disliked the idea of relying on plugins are that they may interfere with one another, interacting with the different plugins is inconsistent, and updating and management become more complex. But like I said, they get me what I need.
On the other hand, I’ve also been working with BookStack for another project. In many ways it’s the opposite of DokuWiki. It looks modern, it has a noob-friendly wysiwyg editor (important when you need people of different technical skill levels to use it), and tries to be “batteries included” in the dev’s words. The problem it’s missing some features I consider essential for a wiki, chief of which is the ability to link to nonexistent pages. There isn’t really a centralized way to manage uploads, either. And since it isn’t extensible, you’re stuck with those features unless the dev decides to add them later.
So I can see why people may prefer one approach over the other, but how about you?
A little of both. I think it’s good for software to be customizable, but layering on plugins often tends to lead to instability or other issues, so the ideal for me is where the program does 90% or more of what I want out of the box, and plugins fill the gaps.
I don’t have a real preference, but one more advantage to the plugin route is that if you need something that’s not available, cobbling together a plugin is much simpler than modify most projects directly.
I recently spent a lot of time doing this with Odoo and I was very grateful for the modularity.
By the way, in case you haven’t found it, there is a pretty decent wysiwyg editor plugin for DokuWiki. I use it at work and it’s been pretty simple for my users.
Plugins. But only if they come from the same software provider and are tested in the same way. Otherwise the support is crappy and I’d prefer the features bundled in.
Used to love plug-in-heavy, customizable tools. Then I realized I loved spending time customizing and installing all those plugins, and not a lot of time getting work done.
Now I just prefer good tools that can do everything I need but not necessarily optimally. As long as they feel really efficient for 95% of use cases and the other 5% are possible (but not optimal) I am good with that. I don’t need to reach for “the perfect tool” anymore.
Since I am a fan of blender I most likely have to vote for the first one. However it was kind of a blessing when many of the features that had to be installed as add-ons before now is a part of the plain software. They tend to implement all of the very popular ones, as a part of the standard program. I think people would lie if they didn’t love everything working right out of the box, so we don’t have to spend time on configuration and more time on actually creating.
Barebones, usually. In general I prefer software that does only one thing and one thing well. Input or output to/from said software can be handled by other pieces software.
I’m a big fan of modular designs where you can swap out any layer with something else, provided that the data interchange is c9mpatible.
Lacking the above, I usually go for barbecues with support for plugins/extensions.
