To Wiki or not to Wiki.....

[rstrickland21]

First of all I would like to say HI to everyone since I am new here! I am having a little bit of an issue trying to decide what to do with a HUGE project that I am doing here at work.

I am taking out information binders with all of our product information in them... and making them virtual so that both locations (AZ and NJ) can easily see where each project is in the creation process including comments, product shots, and possibly even some flash animation will be involved.

We had a meeting between the two offices yesterday and they were saying that it would be a Wiki website so that everyone can post and add things to it. As I sit here thinking about it... I don't know if that is the greatest idea with the amount of information that will be going into each product. There will be at least (and I am not kidding) 100 pages for each figure... and there are 6 figures in a line. Making one line close to if not over 600 pages! We need these separate pages to differentiate the different stages that the product goes through. And it's to my understanding that a Wiki has no predetermined navigation.

[ray326]

If you have six products you want to document you could do that with six webs in a TWiki (http://twiki.org) wiki. What kind of "predetermined navigation" did you have in mind?

[rstrickland21]

Well, it's a lot of information that goes into each figure. Such as likeness, portrait, pose, paint, uniform/equipment. We are talking over 200 images at least. Each of those categories are supposed to be separate so that the different departments can easily find the information that they are looking for. Eventually after we get the initial format down... i want to make the images flash animations so that the departments can zoom in on certain areas of detail. And to me that just doesn't sound like a wiki site.

[ray326]

If there are a wide range of contributors as you stated before then TWiki would work fine for that and it would be the simplest solution. You have a couple of other alternatives. Do a custom web application to exactly fit your use cases or find and tailor or modify some other type of content management system. The former is much more expensive, the latter is somewhat more expensive (labor=expense, time=money). Here's a good place to check out for CMS ideas.

http://opensourcecms.com

[rstrickland21]

Will a TWiki allow flash animations to be implemented? Or is it strictly a data/static image format? I haven't gotten any programs here at work since we just started this BIG project last week. But I was actually thinking about using flash to create all of the binder sites. That way images can't be saved or copied off of the sites.