Moving my personal site from Wordpress to MediaWiki

Why moving away from Wordpress?

When I chose Wordpress for my personal site, I considered writing a blog with technical entries, but eventually, I decided to move away from Wordpress for following reasons:

Which CMS? A blog or a wiki?

I discovered I don't needed a blog but a wiki CMS. I didn't create too many pages and I was much more interested in using the site as a knowledge database rather than temporal blog articles.

The UI: Not suitable Wordpress Themes for wikis

After trying some themes, looking for a wiki alike theme, I found a wiki-oriented theme. However, the look and feel was not the best. I had to change CSSs to make it work, but even after some changes, I didn't actually feel happy with such theme.

Cost: Wordpress was just too much

Wordpress is an excellent product for a professional blog, but my site was just my hobby, and I was not spending too much time on it. Even if my hosting was keeping Wordpress up-to-date, I had to keep the plugins updated, and setting properly those plugins was time-consuming. In addition, writing a new entry took also a huge amount of time.

I needed a simpler product with less features, but more suitable for my needs.

Why moving to MediaWiki?

After checking some of the free wikis on the market, I decided to go with MediaWiki.

In one hand, I had used DokuWiki some years ago, which was very simple, but at the same time, not very popular in terms of plugins (or extensions).

On the other hand, I had the feeling that TikiWiki could be again a very powerful wiki, but less pragmatic for the time I wanted to spend for management.

I decided to go with MediaWiki: a few amount of features, not so configurable like TikiWiki, but with a good amount of extensions.