Yesterday I stumbled across a great post on Academic Productivity by Dario Taraborelli about using a wiki as your web CMS. Dario is a developer for the open source WikkaWiki project, so that is his wiki engine of choice. But, as he explains, this can be done with just about any wiki.

The following are common sources of misunderstanding about wikis that typically blur the distinction between a wiki as software and the function of a wiki:

1. anyone can edit the content of a wiki;
2. wikis look wikish;

Both arguments are false. The truth is that editing privileges in most wiki engines (with some flagrant exception!) can be set on a per-page basis through Access Control Lists. You can then easily restrict read-, comment- or write-ACL for a specific page so that no user other than you, a specific user or more users can access the page.

When first I started using a wiki as a company intranet back in 2002, the benefits to using  a wiki for editing web pages of all kinds was immediately apparent. That idea is largely what prompted me to start EditMe. The addition of a WYSIWYG editor (like the one in Wordpress) to replace the wiki markup that non-geeks often find intimidating makes a wiki a formidable competitor to most CMS systems that companies spend thousands on for licensing and support.

Dario goes on to list some of the unique benefits to using a wiki as CMS:

Here I would just like to suggest three aspects that make wikis a fantastic solution for fast and hassle-free content management:

• they allow you to edit and modify content at the speed of light;
• they allow you to easily embed all sort of contents in a page;
• they allow you to set granular access privileges for specific pages, which is a very powerful solution for collaborative work with colleagues and coauthors;

This is something that folks have been doing with blogs for a long time. Forcing a blog to be a CMS for a non-blog web site can be a very clumsy affair. You end up over-using the after-thought page editor built into the blog software and ignoring the powerful date-based blog engine.

As access controls, WYSIWYG editors and more attractive designs become part of the standard wiki feature set, particularly among open source offerings, I think we’ll start to see many more wikis used in this way.