WikkaWiki

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Image:Wikka_logo.jpg


Wikka 1.1.6.5 released! (June 24, 2008)

WikkaWiki (often shortened as Wikka) is a flexible, standards-compliant and lightweight wiki engine written in PHP, using MySQL to store pages. Designed for speed, extensibility, and security. Released under the GPL license.

As opposed to wiki engines cluttered with built-in features (such as MediaWiki), WikkaWiki aims at keeping its engine light and performant, by focusing on core functionality while supporting extensibility via plugins (called actions). Actions can be installed simply by dropping them in the /actions folder.

Contents

Selected features

  • Support for different types of embedded elements:
  • images;
  • Flash objects;
  • tabular data;
  • safe HTML code;
  • embedded feeds;
  • mindmaps (see below);
  • Advanced access control, with user registration, password management and provision for user profiles, as well as access control lists on a per-page basis.
  • Administration modules to manage pages and users, including tools for bulk operations like user removal or page reversion.
  • Advanced syntax highlighting using GeSHi:
    • support for 68 markup/programming languages;
    • easily customizable output;
    • (optional) line numbering;
    • clickable markup pointers to official documentation;
    • on-the-fly downloading of embedded code blocks;
  • Several page-related features, including full revision control, comments, categories, text searching, page cloning, advanced referrer management, file upload modules, and a GUI page editor.
  • W3C compliant XHTML 1.0 transitional and CSS.
  • Advanced tools for publishing page revisions, including:
  • RSS feeds for recent modifications and page revisions;
  • WikiPing client functionality, allowing page changes to be broadcast and tracked on a remote WikiPing server.
  • A large repository of user-contributed add-ons.

Mindmap support

Wikka was the first wiki to introduce mindmap support in wiki pages. The standard Wikka distribution features a module with MindMap support via FreeMind. If you use FreeMind as your personal mindmapping software, you can directly paste your mindmap data in a wiki page and the map will be generated on the fly.

Image:Wikka_mindmap.png

Installation and fine-tuning

Installing WikkaWiki at DreamHost

Installing Wikka on DreamHost is very easy and doesn't require any specific configuration. All the installation/upgrade procedure is done via a Web-based wizard.

  1. Download the latest stable package from the Wikka website.
  2. Extract the files and upload them to a publicly accessible directory of your webserver (make sure you preserve the directory structure when extracting the files). Alternatively, if you have shell access to your server, you can directly upload the tarball to your server and expand it via tar.
  3. After uploading your files to a folder named, say, /home/username/example.com/Wikka, you just need to point your browser to http://www.example.com/Wikka/ and follow the installer's instructions.

For further information and troubleshooting, refer to this page: http://wikkawiki.org/WikkaInstallation

Invisible integration

Wikka is a powerful tool for collaborative projects, but it works pretty well as an invisible backend for personal or admin-only websites, as it is designed to integrate easily into an existing website. Take a look at nitens.org for a proof of concept (hosted at DH). You can find a detailed tutorial on how to run an invisible wiki engine on this page.

Moving a wiki to a different domain

Once you've installed Wikka, you can easily move it to another directory/domain/subdomain:

1. Move the Wikka installation folder to the new destination. Provided your current installation is under www.example.com/Wikka and you have created a wiki.example.com subdomain, move the Wikka folder to the new destination: 

mv /home/username/example.com/Wikka/ /home/username/wiki.example.com/

2. Update the Wikka configuration file (wikka.config.php) to match the new URL: 

'base_url' => 'http://wiki.example.com/',

External links

Retrieved from "http://wiki.dreamhost.com/WikkaWiki"
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