The next hot PHP app you install might be IBM’s

In case you hadn’t paid any attention to QEDWiki so far, check out this demo. The server-side is written in PHP using Zend’s framework – more detail here and most recent info seems to be here (it’s not released yet – some time soon)

The idea of application wikis and situational applications has a lot of potential IMO. If you consider Dokuwiki (tends to get mentioned round here) for example, its interesting that a number of users have employed it as an alternative to a CMS – it gives you more structure than most wiki’s thanks to things like namespaces but is far more flexible than your average CMS.

More interesting is examining some of the behavior syntax plugins such as the sql plugin;

===== A wiki page with a query =====

Here is the //products// list:

<sql db="mysql://user:pwd@localhost/shop"> select * from products; </sql>

Or the AJAX chat plugin which just needs you to add ~~CHAT~~ to any page.

There’s potential here. Dokuwiki has design limitations, such as it’s difficult to apply access control sections of a page and I doubt that’s easy to fix without a big re-write: that SQL plugin is really only for private wikis.

But given the right fundamental design with stuff like a “DOM” wiki pages, you could go a long way. And it looks like IBM has. Something to watch.