Planning websites with a wiki

When you have an idea for a project, for a cool website or whatever, you have to plan it. This becomes even more important if you work together with other persons.

Planning on paper

Well, you can talk to each other, write ideas down on paper but at some point, you just need something better than this. You need a platform for all project members to communicate, share ideas and to track actions.

I made the experience that you can do all this with a wiki! A wiki allows you to easily set up dozens of pages and link them together. You could structure your ideas and every one (of the members) can make annotations and post follow-up ideas.

MediaWiki

The first thing you have to do is to choose a wiki tool. I took the MediaWiki software, because this is what Wikipedia uses.

After that, set up a sub domain for the appropriate domain. You don’t have to, but I wanted to have an address which everyone could clearly identify the “development wiki” with. “http://wiki.example.com/” is a good address.

Then you can install your wiki, I won’t explain the whole procedure here, it’s pretty well described in the readme and install textfiles.

Here are some things you should change in order to not let the whole world know what you are working on right now:

  • Change permissions for users who are not logged in
  • Make it impossible to set up a new account
  • Optional: Use .htaccess to restrict access to the wiki at all

You’ll need to have a look at the setting user rights page of wikimedia. Now you should be save enough. You can start posting you ideas and thoughts about the new project.

Published by

Julian Bez

Julian Bez

Julian Bez is a software engineer and former startup founder from Berlin, Germany.