One of the latest trends in open-source development, is for the projects website to be created with MediaWiki.

This article on Acts of Volition lists a couple others, as well as one of my current favorite pieces of software, Banshee, a music management and player for GNOME. (I’ve been meaning to blog about Banshee for well over a month).

I still have to put a long term plan together on integrating silwenae .com/.net/.org, and MediaWiki might address it. I don’t need all of the power of a Drupal, WordPress is already running my blog, Jinzora will power my music, and Flickr does my photos. I just need something sticky enough to link it all together.

I went and installed MediaWiki on the Apatheia.org website to see if the guild had any interest in using it as a tool. I’ve long thought it might help facilitate guildmembers signing up for a raid, managing rosters, etc, as the guildmembers themselves could update it, and you’re not reliant on one webmaster or officer to step up.

I integrated this hack to use logins from the guild forums into the Wiki, which was quite helpful. And my lack of knowledge around PHP & CSS started to show as I spend two hours last night, just playing with the header image. There aren’t a lot of good tutorials on creating a skin – especially one with a Novell-type flavor that utilizes a Wiki as a normal website. I came across this one, but it was pretty darn high level, and didn’t even go into the PHP elements.

I’m going to tinker with it, especially the navigation pieces and see what happens. I’m also curious from a social networking experiment to see if any guildmembers latch on to it.