Hi there!

I am basically looking for advice on whether I should implement a wiki or a more general CMS for my application. I've done some research, but I'm still slightly confused just because there are SO many options / variables involved.


My situation:
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I want to set up a _private_ online community for a small group of us developers that develops content for our (public) audience. The purpose of it would be for collaboration on ideas (written down) that we can work on during the off-time and then present to our audience during regularly scheduled shows. I want it to be private so every show is a complete surprise to the audience, but still allows the developers to look at each other's ideas and collaboratively edit them.




Good to know:
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 - this is all text-based content by the way, I'm not talking about a lot of picture / video / audio use

 - right now a lot of our information is in MS Office documents (mostly Word docs and a few excel spreadsheets), not that it's a big deal to convert them or even just use the wiki or CMS from now on, but the possibility to integrate with external file formats might be interesting in some way

 - not many of the developers are very technically savy, so having to do a whole lot of editing or putting in special characters would probably make this idea fail, because they just wouldn't learn how to do it. For example, I know many wiki's have special characters needed for formatting (like if you wanted to make something bold, you might need to enclose it in a series of brackets or something).

 - I'd like to (ideally) create three or four user-levels with different levels of access (admin, developer, volunteer staff, and public). From here I'd like to organize all the content into groups, or projects (I think Mediawiki calls them "namespaces") and be able to assign access on both a _grouping_ of pages, and also on a _page-specific_ level. So maybe a volunteer staff member gets assigned to help a developer with a project. I'd like to be able to add the volunteer's account to that project's "group" of pages, so they can access those pages, but no other "developer-level" pages.

 - something I would strongly like would be the ability to do user polls - we do voting to decide on what ideas we accept or pass on, so the ability to support some kind of vote tracking / topic polls would be really useful (as long as which voter voted in which way was visible)

 - I am not looking for something to be our main website or forums / bulletin board, or our photo gallery or an online back or chat server or anything like that. I'm really only interested in the collaboration and voting mechanisms as long as I can do the above "permissions" settings on content.




Current Considerations:
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So far I've looked into "Mediawiki" as a wiki, or either "Joomla" or "PHP Fusion" as a CMS.

Mediawiki looks promising, but in reading their website they continually stress that it is not made to support much in the way of user-level or page-specific security. So I'm not sure if I'd be able to set up permissions in the way I'd like. I'm also thinking that doing polls or tracked voting on topics wouldn't be possible with Mediawiki, but maybe I'm wrong?

Joomla and PHP Fusion both sound like they might cover my needs, but they also both seem HUGE. Basically like frameworks you can do -anything- with. I've also heard at least with Joomla that it "takes a long time to do _anything_" which I guess is a reference to it being cumbersome. I've also heard these are both slightly complicated to set up. Basically, they seem like they might be too big for what I want - and that they *could* do it, but in the same way that you could buy your own "build your own car" kit to go to the store when a bicycle would do just as well. I definitely would prefer getting on the bike instead of spending days in the garage, but maybe I'm just blowing the complexity of these CMS's out of the water? Would you recommend one of these over the other (I know Joomla 1.5 is a release candidate, but am unsure if it might be more suitable for this than the current stable release)?


Have I missed something that would be perfect but is not one of these three? Or is this a clear choice and I'm just not seeing it? Thanks for any and all possible comments / opinions!