We're trying to get a joomla install going for our medical school and one of the core features is a tightly integrated wiki where third- and fourth-year students can document the little tidbits they pick up about the clerkships they do, an information problem that is famously difficult for students and administrators both to get their heads around. Hassan's A Wiki worked, but though we did have to reinstall the (thankfully empty) wiki into the more standard /w directory, and then there was a problem where I had to edit a line in the MySQL table, and way, that's sounds terrible, right?

But not really, because Hassan was all over it as soon as I asked. He definitely takes pride in his workmanship and he'll take care of his admins. Let me tell you a story:

With A Wiki, if you click to *edit* a wiki page from Joomla, it takes you to the standard mediawiki interface for the editing, which makes sense because that's where all the buttons and special wiki code stuff is, but once you're done editing, mediawiki keeps you in the mediawiki interface. OpenWiki does this too, and MamboWiki is apparently even worse (using an iframe instead).

So I asked Hassan, the A Wiki developer, how I might be able to make the wiki return the user to Joomla. And he wrote this code snippet for me within an hour, and it took several edits to get it right, but he was a step ahead of me: as I'd figure out that his draft didn't work, he'd already be sending me the next draft. We had a cutting edge feature, which required editing mediawiki files, in a couple of hours.

I've asked him to try to make a bridge between Joomla's user database and mediawiki's user database, which would pretty much be the ultimate wiki plugin for joomla, and he said he wasn't exactly sure how to do that. Well, I'm pretty sure he'l figure it out.