PmWiki is a wiki-based[4] content management system designed for a collaborative creation and maintenance of websites.

It supports collaborative website maintenance with built-in tools for access control, delegation, monitoring, review, and edit reversion.

Ease of maintenance is a key design goal, and PmWiki is configurable and extensible, allowing independent updates to the core while maintaining compatibility with local customizations.

According to the author, "For the standard operations (view, edit, page revisions), holding the information in flat files is clearly faster than accessing them in a database..."[15] The storage class is extensible, allowing add-ons to enable other storage systems and formats.

Special namespaces are "PmWiki", Site, SiteAdmin, and Category which contain the documentation and some configuration templates.

PmWiki offers a skin template scheme that makes it possible to change the look and feel of the wiki or website with a high degree of flexibility in both functionality and appearance.

PmWiki follows a design philosophy[7] with the main objectives of ease of installation, maintainability, and keeping non-required features out of the core distribution of the software.

[26] Creating and maintaining extensions and custom installations is easy thanks to a number of well documented hooks in the wiki engine.

There is a "recipe" to allow running PmWiki "Standalone", with the PHP built-in webserver, for example from a USB flash drive.

[27] The following books analyse PmWiki, have dedicated chapters or sections, compare it with other wiki and CMS software: PmWiki has been featured in a number of printed and online magazines including Inc Magazine,[9] Linux Gazette,[10] PCMag,[28] LXer,[29] Framasoft,[30] Linuxfr.