DokuWiki - a wiki
Top Features
- simple interface
- no database needed
There are many great explanations of the idea of the wiki, a good place to start is the godfather of all wikis, wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page ). Dokuwiki has as one of its main aims the idea that it can be used to provide documentation management and maintenance to small companies or departments, and the list of users certainly stands as testament to that ( http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:users )
Dokuwiki itself is quite a small-scale wiki, other products have more features but it has a powerful and stable core feature set. Its main strength, no requirement for a database, is also its main weakness. Not needing a database means that it is fast to install and simple to maintain and care for. If something horrible happens to the server containing the data then the documents are all contained in files which can be read by any text editor – no need to get the database back up and running or install a piece of software to access the information in some proprietary format. However this architecture does mean that DokuWiki is unsuitable for use in a large-scale environment with a lot of content and many page requests, this set up will become very slow. If the requirement is for collaborative editing of a knowledgebase or other set of documents then its perfect.
Another great point about DokuWiki is its markup language. The various products in this field mostly use variations on a similar theme of markup lanuages, there’s (as yet) no standard. Dokuwiki’s version is slick and easy to use – and its onamatapoeic in the sense that often to make something happen you use characters to look like what you want. Tables for example are built of | (pipe) characters as the column separators. To left, right or centre justify the columns, you leave whitespace to the left, right or both sides of each table entry.
Try Our Demo
We’ve got a demonstration version set up and ready for you to play with. There’s no security on any of the pages so you can edit anything you’d like. The pages get restored every night so feel free to play away! You can find the demo at:
http://demo.woollyblanket.co.uk/dokuwiki
Just click around the site and when you see something you want to change then click on “edit this page” and make your changes. Red links are broken links, or pages which haven’t been created yet. To add pages to the wiki just edit the current page, create a new link, and save. Then click on the new red link and on the new page choose “create this page”.
Other Resources
You can download dokuwiki and access community resources at http://www.splitbrain.org