Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

Having used the Open Source TWiki since 2001, and for about a year used a commercial installation of Confluence, I am always looking to cross-contextualize my understanding of the two products.

This report compares Confluence and TWiki from the point of view of pasting of HTML content.

I made this report as I was surprised by what happened when was trying this first on our corporate Confluence extranet and thought I better check that the latest version of Confluence, as run on Atlassian.com was consistent with our install.

So I was trying to paste HTML containing links from

http://www.eweek.com/search_results/0,1208,,00.asp?qry=wiki&vigsite=7&section=&q=wiki&sort=date%3AD%3AS%3Ad1

into Confluence (current version on atlassian.com)

So far so good. I switch from Rich Text to Wiki Markup:

And hit Save:

Note that the links have disappeared. The same result (losing the links) is achieved if you go directly from Rich Text to Save.

TWiki

This is a relatively standard copy of TWiki (version 4.04), with no extra plugins installed.

First, pasting the content:

Now hitting save:

In TWiki, the links from the source document are preserved.

Most of Confluence’s HTML paste functionality is built-in, and that’s what I was testing. I note from http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/HTML+To+Confluence+Converter that there may be a solution, certainly from a coding perspective, preserving HTML links is not hard.

Conclusion

Out of the box Confluence seems to be missing functionality that will hit productivity of novice and expert users alike. For me, pasting links is just too fundamental a feature to miss.

TWiki:Plugins.WysiwygPlugin documents the features of TWiki’s default Rich text editor.

If there is interest I will review Socialtext’s paste HTML functionality.

Technorati : Wiki, Wiki Comparison

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