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How do I make my Web site a wiki?

I've been talking with a lot of my peers and become very interested in wikis. I love the idea of pure collaboration and as I have my own Linux server box, I'd love to be able to just install a wiki application on my box and play with it, but I am lost at that point. How do you figure out what wiki app to use and install it?


Dave's Answer:

I suppose I should come clean right up front and say that I am not a huge fan of wikis because I have found that the benefit of a totally egalitarian content system is offset by the uncontrolled ...

The first challenge is to figure out which Wiki application to use. Since you already mentioned Wikipedia, it doesn't take much effort to find out that it's run on a wiki application called Mediawiki. That might be overkill for you, but it's a terrific application, but you should note on their site the warning: "Do not install MediaWiki unless you intend to keep up with security upgrades."

Other popular wiki apps include Twiki, Socialtext Wiki, and SWiK. If you want more choices, it's probably quite appropriate that Wikipedia has a great list of wiki software you can peruse.

For my own project, a wiki that I put at Brainjam.info, I chose PmWiki.

To get started, jump to the download page. On that page you can grab the app either as a .tgz or a .zip file, your choice. Since I'm using Linux and can handle modern archive formats, I chose the .tgz file.

$ curl -S -o pmwiki.tgz 'http://pmwiki.org/pub/pmwiki/pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65.tgz'

(don't use the above URL, though, go through the Download page so that you get the latest version rather than the one I have here, which will quickly go out of date)

To unpack this is easy: gunzip *tgz followed by tar -x. Now you can see what's going on:

$ gunzip pmwiki.tgz
$ tar xvf pmwiki.tar
pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65/
pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65/pmwiki.php
pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65/docs/
pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65/docs/.htaccess
pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65/docs/COPYING.txt
pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65/docs/DOCUMENTATION.txt
pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65/docs/UPGRADE.txt
many hundreds of lines skipped...pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65/scripts/crypt.php
pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65/scripts/xlpage-utf-8.php
pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65/local/
pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65/local/.htaccess
$

Next step? Move into the newly created directory, and you'll find that there's a file README.txt that's a good first step. Mostly it says "go read the docs/INSTALL.txt" file, which we do.

That details the steps needed to get this going, which is summarized as "open up the file pmwiki.php with your Web browser", which you can find by opening up the directory into which you just installed the software. Here's what you'll see:

Apache Directory Listing

What you want to launch is the file pmwiki.php. I do so, and, predictably, get an error:

PWiki Installation: Permission Error!

The latter solution sounds good, so that's what I'll do.

$ chmod 2777 /home/brainjam/www/brainjam.info/pmwiki
chmod: /home/brainjam/www/brainjam.info/pmwiki: Operation not permitted

Ooops! I need to be root!

$ su
Password:
# chmod 2777 /home/brainjam/www/brainjam.info/pmwiki
#

Now things are looking great:

PWiki Installation: Done!

That's all there is to it for the basic wiki installation. Not bad at all.

Of course, there are a million ways you can customize things with headers, footers, new graphics, skins, and much more, but we'll leave that for now.









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Comments

ya, i have a question in how mis to create a my profile and wikipedia to others so that others can know me personally about me and my faimily and also about my neighbours and know whether they are good or bad.i have lot of friends in my faimily.and lot of girls in my faimily.so how can i create a profile andwikipedia of my own so that others can know about me.

Posted by: r.karthikeyan at April 14, 2008 10:07 AM

I've installed pmwiki, but when I navigate to pmwiki.php, I just see the contents of the file, and not a rendered web page. Any ideas?

Posted by: malcovitch at January 14, 2010 10:51 AM

Dave, a new wiki service that I've recently created may work easier for some newbies. It's simply plug (some javascript or php code) and play. You can check it out at http://www.scribbo.com

Posted by: Zylstra at March 24, 2011 9:23 PM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...
Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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