Software for a personal wiki with (good) LaTeX support

Question

I want to use a wiki for organizing my research in Mathematics. It is only for me and few colleagues.

• It must be an online wiki since I am not the only editing it.
• It needs to have a good support to LaTeX. I would like to create my own macros and, if possible, environments. If I can put all them in a file to use all over the wiki it would be great.

I can host my self if it is needed, but I do not have full access to the server. And yes, LaTeX support is the main thing, I don't really care about any other feature.

What's the best way to go?

Answer 1

Can I suggest that if it is only you and a few colleagues editing it then the way to go might be not a Wiki but rather a number of Jupyter/iPython notebooks, version controlled with git or mercurial and shared using a service such as GitHub or BitBucket.

Jupyter/[iPython] will give you:

• Support for Markdown, Latex & MathJax
• Graphing/Plotting
• Accessing Live/Online Data Sources
• Executable code in python, R, Scada, more
• Publishable in a large number of formats

git or mercurial would give you:

• Good, Distributed, Version control & history
• Merging changes from various contributors
• Offline working

The above tools are free, gratis & open source.

For the on-line collaboration the use of GitHub or BitBucket would give you:

• Central Server for sharing/exchanging your files
• Control of who has access &/or can make changes
• BitBucket charges for private repositories for teams but those are free for teams of up to 5 and for larger teams at recognised academic institutions. (It looks like the owner of the project(s) needs to have a recognised academic institution email address).
• GitHub also charges for private repositories, (even for one person). The GitHub Student Pack freely provides 5 private repositories as are available with a Micro account.

Answer 2

I would like to recommend WordPress with a plugin called WP Latex. WordPress is a powerful content management system available completly free under the open source license, GNU GPLv2+. It has A LOT of plugins which you can use to create the best platform for you needs. It only uses PHP and MySQL so you shouldn't need full access to the server (really, 99.99% of shared hosts out there will be able to provide support for WordPress). I also see that it's just for a few colleagues, I would also then like to recommend another plugin (if you want) called Password Protected. It's a simple plugin where you can lock down content with a short password that would be given to your colleagues only and keep other visitors out of your site.

WordPress

WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

WP Latex

WP LaTeX creates PNG images from inline $\LaTeX$ code in your posts and comments.

Password Protected

A very simple way to quickly password protect your WordPress site with a single password.

Answer 3

If you don't mind a bit of learning curve, perhaps try out vimwiki. The payout is great simplicity and portability. It works great with maths using mathjax, see for example this. And mathjax supports user-defined macros in the way you described (all in one file).

Regarding collaboration, one can use git + dropbox, see e.g. this post.