A DokuWiki Overview

There are many good open source wiki's. I've used MediaWiki, the wiki that Wikiapedia runs on. It's an excellent wiki and recommended if you have a large complex site and expect a lot of hits. Another good wiki, more in line with DokuWiki is PmWiki. But I prefer Dokuwiki to these others because:

• It's lightweight - doesn't need a database to run.
• It's easy to configure - uses a web interface. No manual editing for configuration files on the server.
• There's a large active community of developers who create plugins to extend the function of the wiki. I use a number of these plugins and find them essential.
• Plugins can be installed from the admin interface using your browser. You do not need to download the plugin to your computer first and then upload it to your server.

DokuWiki Home Page

DokuWiki Sytax.

One of the early concepts in the development of Wikis was the idea that you should be able to create web pages without knowing HTML. If this seems like a strange idea you need to understand that wikis were invented before WYSIWYG editors. Most people were probably using telephone modems to access the web. Each Wiki created a simplified markup language that could then be translated into HTML. Most wikis still use wiki language to write their content. However, newer wikis have WYSIWYG editors. There are WYSIWYG editors for DokuWiki, but I don't use them because they aren't reliable and interfere with other plugins.