Our library has been happily using Basecamp for managing projects and collaborating for over a year. We haven’t successfully used it for creating internal product/system documentation or a knowledgebase. Writeboards could have promise but they are not searchable, cannot be categorized, nor can be organized in any sort of hierarchical fashion. A Wiki environment could be perfect for documentation if 37signals had one.

We’ve previously created experimental wikis using Wikispaces, Netcipia, Wetpaint, and Google Sites for collaboration purposes but not for documentation. It seems to me that an external Wiki using Google Sites would be the easiest solution. In other threads in this forum, however, I’ve read that the SSL requirements for Basecamp prevent setting up a CNAME record for a custom Basecamp web address.

Has anyone successfully integrated an external wiki with Basecamp? What approaches have worked for you?

Thank you in advance for sharing your suggestions.

You could signup for a wiki and then place the link in the announcement box and it would show up on every page.

In my mind, the only way to do this would be a separate external service, custom coded.

If I were doing this I would just put the wiki link in the announcement, then hack your wiki to check the referrer. Every time a wiki page loads it would do the following:

1. Check referring url
2. Look through a list of rules you set up for the URL referrals, probably just a bunch of regular expressions, to determine which URLs have related basecamp API data.
3a. If there is no way to get data from the API for the page that referred, display a wiki page named after the referring URI
3b. If there is API data available, display the API results (comments etc) at the bottom of the wiki page (you would have to custom build the html etc for this) and then use the API data to generate a unique name for the wiki page
4. Stick a link in there each time back to the basecamp page it came from

There are a few other issues to deal with when doing this:

1. Authentication will have to be wiki integrated (via API again)
2. Unless you want to put some real time in with the API, basecamp data wont be editable from the wiki