Just installed a Wiki … a DokuWiki

By markusmAdvertising

I have just installed a DokuWiki. Wow, that was easy doing. After ten minutes I had the first article with my freshly uploaded self portrait online. After 20 minutes the site had changed to a nice ready-made template with a sidebar and some little CSS changes. Looks like a professional website now and no wikipedia style at all. Now I only have to work out some content structure and some user group rights to shelter internal content before both gets to messy. Looks very easy … the admin section only has two points 🙂

I just want to have it for some shameless self promotion and for getting hold of my online documentation which is always way behind. It’s definitely not worth comparing it to a CMS but it is so fast to publish and to set it up. And the whole style of Wiki versioning (a nicely colored diff view) is a great feature. Plus a lot more …

Maybe it will grow to a three level communication tool: promotion site, group project documentation and a kind of private personal just-throw-things-at-it.

The easy creation of namespaces (= categories with optional user rights management) and according links is really ‘wiki wiki’ magic … write down the new internal link [[newproject:activity]] in your to-do list, publish and click on it and a new page in the new category newproject is created. It’s a little bit like mind mapping the wiki style.

I wanted to install Trac (Wiki with subversion support) but I ended up
with DokuWiki. I wasn’t willing to fight with subversion … a typical
lazy KISS decision.

A new toy … I am happy 🙂

Categories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: Wiki, DokuWiki, tool, tools, publishing, webdev, promotion, happiness 🙂

9 thoughts on “Just installed a Wiki … a DokuWiki”

  1. I meant WikkaWiki, not WakkaWiki.

    Amazing how one letter typo leads to an entirely different fork! Ha!

  2. Just for your info.
    compare: DokuWiki, PmWiki + WikkaWiki

    And the develeoper of wakkawiki is saying (in German) that he is not supporting the platform anymore. Instead he suggests to use on of the wakka forks (hmmm, bad link). Or the PHP 5 coWiki (which is not in the Wiki matrix) from:

    News – develnet.org
    “coWiki – web collboration tool (GPL)”
    http://www.develnet.org/
    http://www.develnet.org/2.html
    (Update) I just see the project has moved to cowiki.org.

    As always just my 2c …

  3. I’ve got wakkawiki installed; it’s not as fully featured but very easy to customize.

    Dokuwiki was an excellent choice; had it been in php, I would have installed it instead.

  4. I compared DokuWiki and PMWiki on Wiki Matrix and decided to give PMWiki a try. That made my day … no real work at all just playing around for about six hours. From that point of view DokuWiki was ways more productive! PMWiki seems to be very powerful but it took me the whole afternoon to get some sense into my configuration.

    Publishing incl. GUI localization would have been possible after ten minutes for a semi advanced administrator with SSH access (me 🙂 but then I had to explore the documentation and the cookbook. And I got miserably lost …

    It is very fast and it has some advanced features which I still have to test (first try of XML-RPC extension failed, spam blacklist, Wiki farm incl. sharing pages, blog like extension, CMS extensions, …).

    The available CSS templates seem to be very powerful. So powerful that I have to postpone a test with my chosen three column CSS template to tomorrow 🙂

    Resume: I would compare PMWiki with Firefox … you just want to look for a certain extension offering you a certain feature and you get lost …

    Qouted from the page … from some sub-page actually 🙂

    The exhaustive list of Cookbook recipes is a great thing to have: as an alphabetic list as per DictIndex, in automatically-tracked Categories or even manually maintained. However, it takes a long time for people, especially non-programmers, to go through that entire list and choose the features they actually need.

    These two simple sentences might give you an idea what happened to me this afternoon … what to choose 🙂

    This is not at all negative (if you have the time for that)! But the prototype approach to a website which I loved with DokuWiki is not available. Be warned!

  5. I’ve used PmWiki as an online notebook and for other client sites for a couple years now. It works beautifully. The flat file database works well, as do most of the add-ons (cookbooks) scripts. Definitely worth checking out.

  6. What I really love is the mind mapping character. Just type a link and this way create a page or better weave a net of pages without much thinking. Through the different colors you always see if an internally linked page already exists or not.

    I did some research on Wikis about four years ago and did like the concept but did not like the design. But that has changed a LOT since then!

    As I did some research on ‘bliki’ I found out that there are also many people doing incredible things with Wikis as blogs. I.e. in this comment I would have loved to just type in [[wp>bliki]] (DokuWiki style) to offer a link to the Wikipedia definition of ‘bliki’ 🙂

    I need to keep that in my head. I am really thinking if I maybe should switch my Textpattern project over to a Wiki. Writing and linking articles would be so much easier. Now I just have to find a Wiki with real editorial workflow (upload, edit, approve, publish + promote, archive).

    Any hints from somebody on that?

  7. Wiki’s are great for documentation, I jsut lvoe how easy it is to do. The usually simplistic marup code you get with Wiki software means the documentation can’t be over stylised, and it’s extremely easy to create new, or update old documentation.

    For people to be arsed to write, or even read documentation, it needs to be quick and easy to do. Most Wiki’s fit that description once installed. It allows you to focus on the content of what you’re writing, rather than worrying so much about all the logistics of everything.

    Having someone email you a question, and being able to give them a URL link, rather than trying to find the right Word file or something (remembering where it was stored, is that the most up to date version etc…). It’s as good for intranets as the Internet

  8. DokuWiki just needs PHP. Flat file storing is great because of presentation performance (why do I always want to write performancing instead lately 🙂 It just pops up. That was the reason why I installed it … a kind of old school web feeling.

    BTW what’s a ‘bliki’? Ah, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliki I see 🙂 Always learning new things.

    Please, tell me more about the reasons for the switch. Some kind of comparison report or table would be great. I am interested!

    Are you having some hand made templates which you do not need anymore? I would like to test some more. With sidebar or a three columns design would be great.

  9. I too used to run my own bliki on dokuwiki platform until I recently switched to pmwiki. IMO the real strength of both of these packages is that they do not require a database and all of your pages are saved as flat files which makes repurposing your content or moving to another platform fairly easy.

Comments are closed.