With a decent content-management system - such as our Drupal engine - it is reasonable to question the need to support wiki content. Having trained myself in YAGNI I spent some time considering the question. Detractors say that Drupal already supports collaborative content revisioning and rich markup (HTML). Proponents point out that wiki fills a niche for quick digraph expansion and condensed content markup.

With a moderate archive of FlexWiki content I admit my inclination was to look for wiki support in Drupal. On my research deployment of Drupal I enabled and configured the wiki and freelinking modules. Within minutes I realized how limited these modules were (wiki module supports limited markup, no linking; freelinking supports limited linking only). I looked at the PHP code which confirmed that these were quick hacks that (perhaps) the authors will expand upon in the future. So now I am at a decision point (keeping YAGNI in mind): should I extend these modules to support standard wiki features?

Being eager to take on a decent PHP project - and simultaneously having evangelized wiki till blue in the face...it was tough to pull myself back from cutting code. I actually spiked support for namespaces (a big missing feature) via Drupal's node-hierarchy support. As I was coding this I realized something: I do not need wiki markup. Drupal's core modules - book and filter - provide all the functionality I need.

So that solves that quandry. Now I can move on to getting my content online!