Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

Wiki review: DokuWiki

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I’ve been looking for a simple, lightweight wiki application for my website since my recent redesign. Here’s what I wanted:

• quick, no-nonsense install and configuration
• easily restrict editing access (me, and perhaps a small handful of friends)
• clean interface and pleasant markup that doesn’t make me want to scream (TWiki, I’m looking at you!)
• easily themeable to look like the rest of my site
• runs on Perl or PHP for preference

Someone on IRC last week (sorry, I forget who) suggested DokuWiki so that’s what I’ve gone with, and it’s looking great so far.

I particularly liked the simple, one-step install procedure. Check this out:

The three access control levels are simple and just what I needed, and the filesystem-based storage mechanism — no database needed — meant that the whole thing was done in a single step. No mucking around with MySQL!

I set a few configuration options in the admin screen after that, most importantly URL rewriting to make the page names neater and more search-engine friendly, but such configuration is optional. (Bonus point: configuration is entirely web-based, not requiring the editing of PHP files.) One item that I think should’ve been in the configuration and wasn’t, however: the Creative Commons license. I changed mine from the default CC-BY-NC-SA to CC-BY-SA by editing dokuwiki/lib/tpl/default/footer.html.

The user interface and look-and-feel are customisable via templates (i.e. themes or skins), and there are a number of attractive ones available. I suppose I’ll probably be developing my own, but for now I’m using the default template until I get a good feel for the interface and what I want.

There are also a number of plugins available, but again, I’m holding back on those til I see what I need. I suspect that the tag plugin will come in handy, along with one of the improved code markup ones.

From a user perspective, DokuWiki’s syntax seems to be quite similar to MediaWiki’s. In fact, the whole thing has the feel of a lightweight MediaWiki. If anyone ever tells me, “I tried to install MediaWiki but gave up,” I’ll definitely point them in this direction.

In summary: if you want something that looks clean and professional, is easy to install, and doesn’t need to be massively scalable, DokuWiki looks like a great choice.

(If you’re interested, you can take a look at my embryonic Infotrope Wiki in action.)

Ooh, thanks for the recommendation.

I’ve been vaguely looking for Wiki software for a tiny Wiki of my own — just tracking wishlists for my family. (Static HTML pages so far; a Wiki that everyone in the family can edit would be nice, I thought, then they wouldn’t have to keep emailing me to update their page.)

I shall have to look into DokuWiki.

Philip: One thing to note, which might or might not bother you. Since starting with it, I’ve found some features that are specific to technical documentation. For instance, the wiki markup parser wraps some acronyms/terms in “abbr” tabs so that there’s a popup definition. If you look at http://infotrope.net/wiki/somedaymaybe/userbase you’ll see it on “CMS”, “API”, “PHP”, and “Perl”. A lovely feature for my sort of content, and probably won’t interfere with your family’s wishlists, but might confuse them if it happens unexpectedly.

Thanks for pointing out. Finding a good Mediawiki alternative is a bit stabbing in the dark. You never quite know what you’re going to get.