2006-10-15

DokuWiki

Hi, long time gone since my last post. Well, I was not doing "nothing", it's just annoying to blog until it is worth ;-)

I started to take my notes from school with Zim. It's a nice desktop wiki, simple and fast, which writes text files that can be sorted in a tree. It does a really nice job. I'm getting used to Inkscape also, because I use it to draw the schemes and so on.

After awhile I wanted to provide my notes on my website, so I started looking for a Wiki, 1) which writes to text files, 2) which supports more or less the same wiki syntax, 3) which is easy to update when I make changes from Zim.


I figured out DokuWiki, already used by two Xfce projects (Goodies and Thunar). The installation is really easy: download the latest version (currently there are RCs) from here, extract the tarball inside one of your web directory, and launch install.php. One click and you can start with the wiki :-)

I tested some stuff around, and I have get really good help from Christopher on the ##dokuwiki channel at Freenode. Thank you dude :)


First I configured a bit more DokuWiki, these are some of the settings I am using:
$conf['userewrite'] = '2';
$conf['mailguard'] = 'visible';
$conf['mediadir'] = 'data/pages';
$conf['mediaweb'] = 'data/pages';

The configuration userewrite allows to use pretty URLs. With its value set to 2 you can have URLs like http://host/wiki/dokuwiki.php/directory:file. With 1 you can use URLs rewrites from Apache or Lighttpd which removes dokuwiki.php from the URLs. With 0 the pretty URLs are not used.

mailguard obfuscates the emails in the way to avoid spam.

Finally, mediadir and mediaweb, are set to the same directory as the pages. I did so to simplify synchronization between the Zim and the wiki. With this setting I just have to connect to FTP with lftp, cd into the pages directory and run mirror -R.


I needed to get a syntax working with the one written by Zim. There is a plugin Creole available which has the same syntax for the lists, and does proper breaklines for each end of line, I just had to remove the heading tho. You can download it here. Note that I still need to have a look at it for some formatting.


Finally I integrated a sitemap into the default theme with some piece of code from indexmenu plugin. You can download the theme here.


You can visit my DokuWiki at http://mykey57.free.fr/asrall/.