DokuWiki - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

DokuWiki is a wiki application aimed at small companies’ documentation needs. DokuWiki is licensed under GPL 2

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

and written in the programming language PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

. It works on plain text files and thus needs no database. Its syntax is similar to the one used by MediaWiki

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...

History

DokuWiki was created by Andreas Gohr in June 2004. In July the first official release was published on Freshmeat

Freshmeat

Freecode, formerly Freshmeat, is a website owned by Geeknet that allows computer users to keep track of the latest software releases and updates as well as write/read reviews and articles, send or receive comments to or from the author, and many other features...

. A big step in the development was the re-design of the parser and the renderer in January 2005. The new design was a big performance improvement and made DokuWiki usable for bigger documentation projects. It also prepared DokuWiki for an introduction of a generic plugin interface which simplified the development and maintenance of add-ons. A push of the level of awareness was the introduction of DokuWiki in the Linux distributions Debian

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

in April and Gentoo Linux

Gentoo Linux

Gentoo Linux is a computer operating system built on top of the Linux kernel and based on the Portage package management system. It is distributed as free and open source software. Unlike a conventional software distribution, the user compiles the source code locally according to their chosen...

in July 2005. Since 2005, it has achieved significant usage.

Main features

Revision control

Revision control, also known as version control and source control , is the management of changes to documents, programs, and other information stored as computer files. It is most commonly used in software development, where a team of people may change the same files...

: DokuWiki stores all versions of each wiki page, allowing the user to compare the current version with any older version. The difference engine is the same as the one used in MediaWiki

MediaWiki

. Parallel editing of one page by multiple users is prevented by a locking mechanism.
Access control

Access control

Access control refers to exerting control over who can interact with a resource. Often but not always, this involves an authority, who does the controlling. The resource can be a given building, group of buildings, or computer-based information system...

: Access control can be handled by a user manager which allows users and groups of users to be defined, and an access control list

Access control list

An access control list , with respect to a computer file system, is a list of permissions attached to an object. An ACL specifies which users or system processes are granted access to objects, as well as what operations are allowed on given objects. Each entry in a typical ACL specifies a subject...

where an admin user can define permissions on page and namespace level, giving it much better access control than Mediawiki.
Plugins : DokuWiki has a generic plugin interface which simplifies the process of writing and maintaining plugins. There are over 750 plugins available. These can be easily integrated and managed by an admin user with the help of the plugin manager.
Templates

Web template

A web template is a tool used to separate content from presentation in web design, and for mass-production of web documents. It is a basic component of a web template system.Web templates can be used to set up any type of website...

: The appearance of the wiki can be defined by a template. There are various templates provided by the development community.
Internationalization and localization

Internationalization and localization

In computing, internationalization and localization are means of adapting computer software to different languages, regional differences and technical requirements of a target market...

: DokuWiki supports Unicode (UTF-8

UTF-8

UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...

), so languages such as Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

, Thai

Thai language

Thai , also known as Central Thai and Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively...

, and Hebrew

Hebrew language

Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...

can be displayed. DokuWiki can be configured in about 40 languages.
Caching

Cache

In computer engineering, a cache is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster. The data that is stored within a cache might be values that have been computed earlier or duplicates of original values that are stored elsewhere...

: DokuWiki stores the rendered output of parsed wiki pages to reduce server load.
Full text search

Full text search

In text retrieval, full text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full text database...

: DokuWiki has an integrated indexed search with which a user can search for keywords on the wiki.

Other features can be found on the feature list on the official web site.

External links

DokuWiki homepage
DokuWiki forums
DokuWiki IRC log
DokuWiki on WikiMatrix, a website for comparing wiki software

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

History

Main features

See also

Further reading

External links