Loving DokuWiki

November 28th, 2004 • General

During my search for the perfect wiki, Aaron told me about DokuWiki and that I should give it a try; so I did. Right now, it’s my choice for running Codeflakes Wiki, and here’s why:

• Plain file backend:

  DokuWiki uses simple text files as its storage, no complicated SQL queries, grep, sed and awk all work like a charm, and even if the server is turned off, I can still get all my data.

  I know that other solutions are good as well. XML and SQL databases are great, but they have their place, and I really don’t think that a wiki belongs there, wikis are either hierarchies (in case of namespace support) or a flat list of links. There are no complex relations between various components.

• Simple revisioning

  DokuWiki appends timestamps to filenames and moves them from data directory to attic, and that’s about it. There’s a nice diff engine, and better yet, GNU diff works two on any two files, you can even create patches, it just doesn’t get simpler. Maybe future versions should consider using Subversion, since it already solves most of a wiki’s problems.

• Namespace support

  I’m not a neat freak, but I like my stuff organized, maybe not into namespaces, but that’s still good. Faceted categorization would’ve been a better idea, but I understand it’s more difficult to implement.

• Simple syntax

  No fancy stuff, the syntax is easy, obvious, and just works. Yes, it doesn’t have it all, you don’t have plugins like coWiki, you don’t have advanced formatting tools, but you have almost everything you need, headings, paragraphs, lists, links, tables, Interwiki, and most of all syntax highlighting (admit it, geeks like that stuff).

• ACL

  Finally, a wiki with ACLs that aren’t a pain in the neck. You only have one file to edit and it’s where you store permissions for users and groups, you can let or restrict people from editing, creating pages, etc. PAM integration isn’t a necessity, but it’s a big plus. DokuWiki however has LDAP support for authentication.

• Bells & Whistles

  The rest is mostly bells and whistles to me, but they’re still nice features like RSS, Recent Changes, Changelog, an editing toolbar, XHTML compliant code, a nice design. mod_rewrite support is however essential.

• Neat Stuff

  If you’re using Mozilla’s Site Navigation Bar you’ll probably like this, in More -> Other Versions, you’ll see 4 pages to view, Recent Changes, Current namespace, Plain HTML and Wiki Markup of the current page. You don’t have to click Edit This Page just to figure out how something is written in this wiki.

  There are 2 CSS files that control the formatting, one is the display version of the page, the one you see in your browser, the other is the printable version, which you’ll get once you click print. Nice going DokuWiki.

I happen to be a minimalist, I like things that work out of the box, don’t fill my head with tons of greatness crap and market buzzwords, give me exactly (or nearly exactly) what I want, nothing more nothing less, and let me be able to add and extend myself without causing too much hassle. Thankfully, DokuWiki does just that.

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