Deki Wiki as a style guide tool – part 1

In my master thesis I argue that dynamic style guides makes it easier for projects to have a style guide that is used and maintained through a project. I discuss a custom tailored tool, and argue that it is necessary to build a tool that integrates with developer tools such as Eclipse, Visual Studio, Jira etc. to track the use of style guide elements, and to make style guides usable and easy-access to gain commitment from all stakeholders.

In an enterprise project in public sector in Norway, done by Capgemini, we have a need to make our style guides digital. We do not want to use Word – documents even though we use Microsoft Office Sharpoint Server 2007 as our project web. The reason for this is that we loose the flexibility, overview, and control on what’s going on. Using a Wiki is the nearest solution I have found compared to a custom tool.

I have tried all kinds of Wikis, and the best so far is without doubt: Deki Wiki from Mind Touch. It is a Open Source Wiki based on PHP, .NET web service, MySQL database and it can run on almost any platform.

It has great features, and I will mention the ones that made my choice easy (you can read the whole feature list here):

• WYSIWYG editor
  Makes it easy for every developer, contributor and reviewer to participate without knowledge of WIKI syntax
• Versioning
  In any project it is essential to have a good and usable versioning tool. It supports a great comparison view between different versions of a page, and makes it easy to roll back at any time.
• Attachments and media
  The need to describe elements using illustrations and images, and also videos can be covered by this Wiki. It is also easy to upload media and files, and to reuse the elements in other pages.
• Access control and Active Directory integration
  It is crucial for the success of integration of the tool into our project infrastructure, that it supports integration with Active Directory (AD). It works great, and all our users can login using their existing usernames and password on the project domain. The Wiki can also set default rights on new domain users.

It is the total of all features that makes this product so great, and the fact that it is wrapped aesthetically and usable makes my first choice for this job. Our style guide Wiki depends on good usability and great user experience and we hope this Wiki will be our solution during the project. We just started using it, so I’ll keep you updated on how it works when all stakeholders are using it.

In my next blog post, I will describe the technical challenges and solutions for how to install the Wiki on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V.