portals vs wiki

[softworkz]

Fellow Monks I may have to set up a web portal or a wiki site for my dept and you guys are the first stop after a quick google. I have never set one up before but I was wondering if there's a good place to start for portals or wiki's out a can??

So far all I know is this..
web interface
IM capabilities
some profile type info
file uploads
uploaded updates get sent to the user group via email

now here's the chuckle from my first meeting with a none techie type...
"I belong to a yahoo group and I want those features for us, I reply that's a tall order.. why can't you just get the code from yahoo...??"

Currently I'm stuck on a windoze box but I may be allowed to use linux and apache for this but I really don't want to roll my own if a generic one is out there. I once used blackboard in college but I don't remember if all the features I'd need is in there, can't remember.

Any idea's on where to start? Thanks!

[jbrugger]

Have a look at Wikimedia. ok, it's written in php, but the wikipedia uses it, it's rather fast and easy.
Also do i like moinmoin (in python). You might read this to learn more about it.
i fancy a wiki due to it's flexible nature.

ps. if you want to stick to Perl, look over here.

[Mutant]

++ wikimedia .. in fact the *only* thing I don't like about it is they didn't write it in Perl ;)

[chas]

There's a lot of modules for use in wiki building on CPAN. (Check out here.)
chas

[dorward]

The first thing I would do is to find out exactly what they want and why. Get them to sit down, thing about what they want, and describe it on paper - then justify it with a business case. (That does a reasonable job of weeding out "cool" things that they don't need, but doesn't work well if the non-techy is above you in the chain of command - some jobs just demand you suffer a PHB.)

Try to get them away from the web interface; unless they are working from many different locations it will almost certainly be a lot easier to deal with file uploads by dumping a Samba server on them. You could write a Perl script triggered by Cron to scan the directory for new or updated files every hour and send the emails then (using a prerolled mailing list package).

The system might not be wonderfully integrated - but you'll probably be able to get it running a lot sooner then trying to roll a web community system.