DokuWiki

A simple open source Wiki system with some lightweight content management system features, most notable feature is that it does not require a database connection and therefore can be set up to be mighty fast on web servers that efficiently cache text pages such as IIS. DokuWiki is written in PHP and can take advantage of the SQLite database system in some circumstances.

Note that although the project has been more open for internationalisation in the last few years there is still a long standing issue with how it handles international characters that the main author has been unwilling to sort out or even discuss. Unlike a database driven system that can easily substitute a link for just about anything, a file driven system like this will have to read and write links as the actual filenames. Since UNIX type filesystems are not Unicode safe and many of these projects originate on UNIX like systems, it has traditionally been resolved by using US-ASCII substitutions on file writes i.e. the file name "pétís.ölð" became "petis.old", "pe_ti_s.o_ld_", "p-t-s.-l-" or some scheme like that.
 * International issues

The problem with some of these kind of schemes is twofold, you can easily end up in situations where you cannot have pages named "pétís.ölð" and "pætés.þlï" although they mean completely different things, if your text substitution scheme is not well thought out. On reading back the modified file you hit another problem in that the filename may not resolve back into the original name, this is by no means an difficult problem to overcome if some thought is put into the system but in the case of DokuWiki the schema is so simple that only accented characters that exist in German resolve back correctly.

This means that all mechanisms that rely on filenames such as the automatic generation of menus, fail in all but 4 languages, so all international menu items must be done by hand rather than using the automatic Wiki/CMS system which cuts down the usefulness of the system, the automation after all is the reason you are using a CMS and not a web page editor. Even if your site is in English only it means that you will be in trouble if you use correct spelling of names such as in the case of American singer & producer René Angélil or Icelandic chieftain Þórður Kakali, and while some of the colonial variants of English do not require loanwords to use the original spelling, standard English does, so using a French loanword like naïve etc, is going to get you into trouble.

Version

 * 2012-10-13 "Adora Belle"
 * 2015-08-10a
 * 2017-02-19e
 * 2018-04-22b "Greebo"


 * Prerequisites
 * PHP 5.3.3 or higher


 * Optional software
 * SQLite


 * Editors with DokuWiki file support
 * jEdit - Java based editor - DokuWiki markup syntax highlighting available as a separate download

License

 * Open source software released under the GPL v2
 * Author: Andreas Gohr

Links

 * DokuWiki homepage