My $.02 on the topic:

My friends are starting a new project, which involves streaming videos and other interesting stuff. Now what they need is, like Łukasz said:

1. an internal issue tracker, just to organize work
2. internal document repository, to keep designs etc
3. a support site for their users — a place to submit questions, bug reports etc.
4. a community site — for users to exchange ideas

Hosting software was a no-go, because it is too much hassle. It is much easier to pay for the service and not to care about server administration, backups etc. It is actually even cheaper.

Now they went through available options, some better some worse. Just to name a few: Lighthouse App for internal tracker, Tender App or Zendesk for customer support, User Voice for feedback collection.

Now the first disadvantage is that those are separate services. Some of them work nicely with others through API, some don't. Figuring out how to choose a set that works took a while. And each of them have different interfaces and often impose non-compatible workflow.

Another thing is the cost, which would start at $50 a month for a minimal setup, but as they scale it can easily reach $300 a month as their project grows.

I have simply advised them to take a look at Wikidot. Internally we are doing issue tracking only on Wikidot… we run everything on Wikidot actually. It is not without drawback, obviously, but you get the flexibility that none of other services can offer. Your wiki can be an issue tracker, a forum, just anything.

The main drawback is that you need to spend some time on learning Wikidot and customization. But if your team is going to spend a few hours a day using the system, this up-front investment is not that large. But this is where Iron Giant project can help. It provides a growing number of customizable site templates.

And the cost… you can grow up to 20 sites with unlimited members for $239 a year, which is roughly 10% of the cost of using separate services. Wow. It might look even too cheap, but this is only because we are setting prices based on our actual costs. Which so far our users like :-)

internal document repository

Until it is possible to search for documents attached to pages Wikidot will have difficulty being accepted as a proper document repository. A text repository yes, but not a document repository.

I am developing a site for a legal library in the UK which needs to store and create legal document styles. I have done this by using dataforms and the file field (a brilliant bit of recent functionality), copying the text into a dataform and using a file field to attach the original word document (for offline use) all in a single process. It works well and the user can do a search for document text, open the page and then download the attached document if they need to.

So it's almost there. But if you were to find a way to search for attached files and return the page they were attached to (Wish 197) then Wikidot really would really start to be a document repository.

PS: educating organisations to stop thinking of Word as the best way to store, manage and collaborate on their information is also key here.

Your model seems to be that a single wiki has a single function. There are certainly good arguments for that.

This does mean that these functions can't be added to an existing wiki. Nor can a single wiki support more than one function, which may allow more powerful solutions to be developed. Both of these could be supported if the templates were designed to allow the new clone-category functionality to be used. At the moment the various bits of functionality are spread between several categories including _default, so using the category cloner is not possible.

Maybe have a two-step template, so a fully functional site can be generated by cloning the whole template site, but the functional unit can be created by just cloning a single category.

Arugh…! SPAM!

Only to inform you all of my german community site http://user-gemeinschaft.wikidot.com/ is now growing and growing… we have a second admin now and the first 4 members.. :)
and it seems that in german language space the teachers are more interested in wiki's.
Now we have a little discussion if we should change the name "user-gemeinschaft" to another one like "WikidotNutzer" ( german for user) - for better finding oin google .. but this is interesting:
You can find WikidotNutzer only over the inserted thumbnails in the Bottom Bar of other wikidot sites!
What am I missing ?
The recurring sentence "WikidotNutzer" in another "Home-page" header or sentence?
Not only in the tagline?

• Bad news: after some tries I mentioned - "wikidot" in the name is reserved!…