The importance of an in-house wiki
For any company, no matter the size, it’s important to have a centralised ecosystem that is easily accessible. This system could house project standards, important references, best practices, software technology tutorials, and it could be even a reference point for projects.
I did an experiment at HOK, combing through the information that I know best, and putting it on an internal wiki. The intention is to share the unique knowledge and expertise that each of us posses.
The wiki has been the effort of 2+ years of research, conversations around the office, and time "hacked" in order to start to make it a reality. A lot of research was done on modern wiki platforms, formatting, and availability of offline access. After exploring many platforms, the initial wiki release has been compiled using MKDocs, and all documents have been written in markdown, ensuring future interoperability with other wiki platforms, SSGs and other content management systems.
Offline access has been the single most important feature, as in its current proof-of-concept version, the wiki is hosted and accessible via direct folder access. It works just as well as being set up in a proper server access, except for the search functionality.
The wiki’s allow themes to be installed, including the one currently being used, with no further coding. It has a vertical menu, and a table of contents based on the header tags in each of the documents.
The current limitations of the platform is that it has no blog feed for automatic summary, and no front matter support for summaries, categories, and tags.
Besides mkdocs, I have tested and looked into using the following other platforms:
Grav CMS - I am quite familiar with Grav as I use it for my personal website. It's the modern alternative of Wordpress and sits nicely between SSGs and wordpress. Like SSGs, it uses markdown files and a flat-file and folder based organisation. Like Wordpress, it has a nice GUI, with login details, that may be useful for less tech-savy users. However it cannot work without a server environment
Hugo - this is a full fledged SSG may be too complicated for a simple in-house wiki