I've been playing with Wikipedia, Wikia, VoodoPad, and several free wiki services for months. Excepting VoodooPad, they all seemed klunky, counterintuitive, and hacker-oriented. Now along comes Project Forum (with SSH) or Course Forum (w/o SSH) and it's an epiphany. It's a wiki you download and have up and running in literally 5 min. And then you are immediately busy with the web-only interface figuring out how to organize it to your purposes, with zero learnng curve in terms of getting it to do the basic wiki thing of creating linked pages that anyone can edit.

It's a very different self-contained proprietary approach to wikis that won't appeal to free/open software hounds who relish hacking the thing into existence. It WILL appeal to folks who just want to get on with finding out what a wiki can do for collaborative efforts. And for what it does, the price is reasonable, particularly if security is not a high priority, as for education.

Of course the real epiphany is a web page that can be edited in place by the viewer. Why no one thought that was important for the first 15 years of the web (except for Ward Cunningham, of course), I cannot imagine. Having brought 5 or 6 project groups into existence in one day and one weekend of fiddling around, I can't imagine having much interest in any other web site creation approach in the future. Good grief! No more color coded html! No more SFTP tools or reloads. Hit save changes, and the page appears. This changes everything in a way comparable to the first text editors!

A few more detailed impressions:

* zero user interface application; everything is done via a browser.
* you may need some help proxying the server so that it works with your existing port 80 web server. Each setup differs enough that general instructions are not quite general.
* site changes are reported with page names (or full contents if security not an issue) in automatic RSS feeds. Monitor activity with an RSS news reader. How cool is that!?
* image and file attachment uploads of course!
* tagging text as a link automatically creates a page of the same name
* supports wikis within wikis that are within the site, each administered separately.
* excellent online help, with hint buttons in critical places, downloadable userguide, and FAQ in depth.
* Online forum and email support are very responsive.

Downsides:
* 508 compliance documentation does not exist yet
* minor problems with different browsers; alignment or graphics.