So the years of delay are caused by the DotNetNuke wiki core module not being suitable for a wiki? Why not fix the the core wiki module then? That would be the obvious solution. Or make a new one? The wiki is a community service for the DotNetNuke community.  DotNetNuke is an open source CMS with a  wiki core module offering. If the wiki module team are not up to the task they should ask for help and recruit more people from the community.  

This conversation comes up from time to time, and there seems to be an occasional perception that we don't want to do a wiki for some nefarious reason - this could not be further from the truth. The more information out there that users can use to resolve issues and learn DotNetNuke the better for everyone - this includes Pro customers who frequently search the forums for answers before raising them with the Support desk.

Theres actually been a tremendous amount of work done getting a wiki on dotnetnuke.com. Much of this isn't visible, but it's important that we do it, but do it right i.e. no half-assed attempt just to check something off a list. It has to become a useful, ever growing resource.

We've actually tested and piloted a number of choices from integrating external products such as screwturn into our membership system to 3rd party modules to the core wiki module, and feel we're close to having a correct solution (a 3rd party dotnetnuke module). At present we're testing this internally, so we can evaluate performance and functionality - our feedback to the company involved has already resulted in a number of bug fixes over the past few months as we work together to bring it up to production quality for running on a large installation. It's not just simply a case of release it and go, we need to ensure security and performace are not impacted - on a site the size of dotnetnuke.com even a small issue can cause noticeable performance impacts. In addition we need to make sure that it doesn't sit unused and put moderators and policies in place, all of which we're working on.

To some of the other points:

• the core wiki, we installed a copy for the core team here over a year ago to pilot it and found that it wasn't suitable for this site -note: it's suitable in some cases but on a site such as dotnetnuke.com we need various additional functions that it doesn't support such as categorisation, tagging,wikiwords, rollback's (to any version), moderation etc. In addition the core wiki stores content as html, meaning the content (and style) is locked into the module - we want to store content as wiki markup meaning we can transfer it between different wiki products (if needed)
• there have been at least half a dozen community wiki efforts either using the core wiki or other tools, none of which have ever captured much attention and typically disappear after only a short period. As such part of the wiki process is to ensure there is some content in place immeadiately, as well as the ability to moderate and accept new content (and ensure that users aren't stealing copyrighted content). In additon we need to ensure that Core team members are committed to this, and see about getting the Corp to commit some hours to populating content - as well as seeing about updating Corp policies so that the wiki can become a resource for documentation on new features.

Please note, this is just one of the documentation efforts the reference team are working on - others including updated online help, automatically generated API  documents (and soon an online website hopefully) are also underway.

Finally, I take the point about a blog, but as we've had a number of delays (we originally planned a release Q3 2009), many of them out of our control, a blog promising a wiki without providing a fixed date or accurate ETA might not be well received.

Thanks,
Cathal

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I was wondering where to put this comment - so far this thread seems the most appropriate.

There is no question that the current DNN core wiki module is missing all kinds of important functionality. I guess it will not work for the wiki on dotnetnuke.com.

However, the core DNN wiki module currently is the only module that I know of in which we can display dynamic content with proper SEO. I use the blog module to write long articles and then synthesize the same info in a wiki using the core DNN wiki. I can pretty much guarantee that the only pages that get indexed by search engines are the wiki ones. The blog module has all kinds of functionality, but frankly, it is missing the most important one - the ability to add meta data such as descriptions and keywords to blog posts. I can't think of a single other core DNN module (except pages with static HTML) that will allow me to add content with proper SEO.

The one thing that scares me is that, once a new wiki module has been chosen, this very important SEO functionality will get lost. My site at that point will become pretty useless. My personal preference would be to just put some better authorization and taxonomy / tagging in the current core wiki. Of course, there is still the issue of how markup is used and stored, but smaller sites can deal with that.