Fooled around a bit with DokuWiki this morning.

I have the notion to resurrect the dusty old parts of http://patrick-rice.net/ – all the static HTML files created with CityDesk, way back when – as a wiki. Why? Because static HTML pages are bad: hard to create, hard to edit, hard to manage. But any site-management tool that runs on a desktop machine is no better: if the site file is on the iMac, I can’t make changes from the laptop. So I need a content-management system that runs on the web server, and is accessible from a web browser.

And that’s what a wiki is.

At first, I thought to use MediaWiki, but it requires a database. I’m too cheap to pay the $18/month Pair charges for an account with MySQL access, so that rules out MediaWiki. (That, and the rather off-putting tone of the MediaWiki web site. It seems that MediaWiki was designed for big and important sites, like Wikipedia. Operators of small & unimportant sites are discreetly encouraged to go elsewhere.)

DokuWiki seems popular. People have been saying nice things about it. So this morning I downloaded the latest version (release 2009-02-14b).

The tar command on the Pair server didn’t recognize the DokuWiki file as a valid tar.gz file. I had to unzip it on the laptop (with the cygwin unzip command) then copy the directory tree up to the server.

There were permissions problems: the conf and data directories need to be writable by the web server, but the web server is running under a generic www user account. Which means anybody’s cgi scripts have access to my DocuWiki directory. (Pair provides a way to run cgi scripts under specific user accounts. I use it for Movable Type, even though it’s terribly slow.) Easily fixed: chmod -R 777 conf data.

With that out of the way, the install script worked nicely. Soon enough I had my very own wiki to play with.

Five minutes later, I deleted it. The pages were too funny-looking, and I really didn’t want to deal with the security issues. So goodbye, DokuWiki,

(This left behind a number of files & directories that had been created by DokuWiki, hence were owned by the www user account, hence could not be deleted by my account. I had to write a little php script of my own to chmod the files into a state where I could delete them.)