phpMyFAQ or MediaWiki

In this board you can talk about general questions about phpMyFAQ

Moderator: Thorsten

Post Reply
annettgross
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Nov 18, 2022 10:48 pm

phpMyFAQ or MediaWiki

Post by annettgross »

Hello,

I am currently researching.
Whether phpMyFAQ or MediaWiki is better suited for one of our information platforms about eye laser and refractive surgery.
In what very you the difference?

Greetings,
Annett
Grunt
Posts: 38
Joined: Fri May 27, 2022 2:29 pm

Re: phpMyFAQ or MediaWiki

Post by Grunt »

TLDR; Overall, it's a really good (and pretty) application with potential, but some quirks that may keep it from being the application of choice.

I chose to work with phpMyFAQ for it's modern looking interface. From a couple demo's I've shown, the ability to ask questions and have them turned into KB articles is really desirable. Thorsten, the developer, is working on bringing it up to Bootstrap 5 which will, in my opinion, greatly improve the ability to customize the interface. It's all customizable now with scss, but I think that's a lesser known framework and not as easy to work with as bootstrap.

There are some quirks here and there, especially if you use a non-LAMPS (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) implementation. I deployed a test setup on Windows Server with SQL for the DB and there were failed queries. However, Thorsten was pretty quick to resolve the issues. In addition, it's open source and, for someone like me with very little programming knowledge, I was able to identify the bugged queries and implement fixes myself before Thorsten released a patch.

Even on a LAMPS setup, I frequently see some issues. When submitting or editing a FAQ, you don't always get a confirmation message after submitting the FAQ, it just sits there with a busy spinning wheel or appears to do nothing. Documentation is incredibly sparse. There are mentions of features, but that's where it stops. You have to search the forums for how to implement if it's not straightforward (i.e. templates).

Some of these issues may be related to my test environment, but I haven't taken the time to troubleshoot and try alternative deployment methods. My current "production" setup is on a Proxmox virtualization cluster running on Raspberry Pi hardware with the application and database on separate guest servers. Definitely not mainstream and maybe running on an x86 architecture or combining the app and DB on a single server would resolve them.
Post Reply