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We use mediawiki and and recently IT invested in confluence. I hate it, because it's slow. but I do see it has some benefits, for example, it automatically ge

We use mediawiki and and recently IT invested in confluence. I hate it, because it's slow. but I do see it has some benefits, for example, it automatically generates a content table. so content discovery is easier. it is also designed to be a document system for a software company. you can use it to create meeting notes and tag people. but overall, I liked mediawiki, the problem with it is, it's hard to make sure things are up-to-date. and it's difficult to do content discovery.

2muchcoffeeman 9y ago
Pretty sure on a blank page Confluence has no table of contents. I am always adding those to pages. Maybe you are using a template. My recollection of using MediaWiki is that it was also better in that regard.
bbarn 9y ago
Confluence is not worth using with Jira. It's true ability to shine is in how well the two can integrate. You can effectively have design doc driven project management with a few clicks and save a ton of duplication of effort between your documentation and project tracking efforts.
avn2109 9y ago
We too use Confluence and it's abundantly unbelievably awful. * Super bloated and laggy * Hard to get your data out/migrate to some rival system. Did your technical writers spend a bunch of time typing strings into a table using the Confluence table building GUI, and now you want that data as a .csv? Too bad, hope you want to spend half an hour in copy-and-paste + reformatting hell. * Impressively broken search (e.g. if you create a page named "foo" and then search for "foo," you'll often get pages of unrelated results that do not include your page called foo) * Can't natively show typeset math. Doing so requires plugins that are somehow both expensive, broken, and only compatible with narrow ranges of Confluence versions. * Gross nonstandard markdown dialect These are just the shortcomings that I can think of right now. However I think even Confluence is probably better than submitting PR's for docs changes as the OP mentions, since at least it's a wiki.
- dalemyers 9y ago
  These are basically the same issues we have. We've ruled it out entirely as a suggestion. Markdown documents and searching on disk is better than Confluence.
wila 9y ago
Yep, also use confluence wiki for a customer and it is horrible. For another company I use mediawiki. Nothing beats that. Easy to edit, easy to maintain, good search capabilities, plenty of ways to extend. Edit: for updates of mediawiki use installatron, for structuring documentation you can use categories.
anotheryou 9y ago
There are some big confluence UI annoyances though: - wide screen support (paragraphs to across the whole screen) - Every page is a folder and the add-button is visually above the current page in the hierarchy, but creates a child page. Easy for techies once they figured it out, hard for new people and the rest of the company. - no tree-view by default - comments can't be seen in edit-mode - no markdown Biggest pro though: - collaborative editing in a wiki (and still a dedicated edit-mode so work in progress remains hidden from those trying to just read the resource)

2muchcoffeeman 9y ago

Pretty sure on a blank page Confluence has no table of contents. I am always adding those to pages. Maybe you are using a template. My recollection of using MediaWiki is that it was also better in that regard.

bbarn 9y ago

Confluence is not worth using with Jira. It's true ability to shine is in how well the two can integrate. You can effectively have design doc driven project management with a few clicks and save a ton of duplication of effort between your documentation and project tracking efforts.

avn2109 9y ago

We too use Confluence and it's abundantly unbelievably awful. * Super bloated and laggy * Hard to get your data out/migrate to some rival system. Did your technical writers spend a bunch of time typing strings into a table using the Confluence table building GUI, and now you want that data as a .csv? Too bad, hope you want to spend half an hour in copy-and-paste + reformatting hell. * Impressively broken search (e.g. if you create a page named "foo" and then search for "foo," you'll often get pages of unrelated results that do not include your page called foo) * Can't natively show typeset math. Doing so requires plugins that are somehow both expensive, broken, and only compatible with narrow ranges of Confluence versions. * Gross nonstandard markdown dialect These are just the shortcomings that I can think of right now. However I think even Confluence is probably better than submitting PR's for docs changes as the OP mentions, since at least it's a wiki.

dalemyers 9y ago
These are basically the same issues we have. We've ruled it out entirely as a suggestion. Markdown documents and searching on disk is better than Confluence.

wila 9y ago

Yep, also use confluence wiki for a customer and it is horrible. For another company I use mediawiki. Nothing beats that. Easy to edit, easy to maintain, good search capabilities, plenty of ways to extend. Edit: for updates of mediawiki use installatron, for structuring documentation you can use categories.

anotheryou 9y ago

There are some big confluence UI annoyances though: - wide screen support (paragraphs to across the whole screen) - Every page is a folder and the add-button is visually above the current page in the hierarchy, but creates a child page. Easy for techies once they figured it out, hard for new people and the rest of the company. - no tree-view by default - comments can't be seen in edit-mode - no markdown Biggest pro though: - collaborative editing in a wiki (and still a dedicated edit-mode so work in progress remains hidden from those trying to just read the resource)