Our prior site was PHP based and has a pretty decent blog attachment to it.
We are moving to a wiki based (using mediawiki) site for a number of reasons:
- Websites are 10% look and 90% content. There was a huge effort to get the look right in the past that took away from getting content in.
- Anyone on our team can add and edit content. They don't need to have any PHP experience. The wiki markup is much easier.
- Page linking is easy. It's very easy for us to decide to add a cross link to another page and in seconds to have it done
- For free we get links at the top of pages to sections that follower farther down in the page.
- Free searching. Want to know about drive trains, just put drive train in the search box
- We get forward / back link checking, we can see what pages link to others, and what pages have been ophaned.
- Anyone can enter content. Yes this is here twice but we are planning that all of the sub-component groups (drive,game,electrical,programming, etc) to update every few days in the build season. The wiki makes it easy for multiple preople to edit the same page.
- If we decide to change the look and feel then the wiki "skin" takes care of that, I don't need to worry about custom PHP code or CSS code someone may have put on one of their pages.
Granted all of the above points can be managed in a CMS based site, but there is more administrative work that needs to be done.
Foster