Choosing, Setting Up and Using a Wiki System

This section deals with finding a wiki system that's right for your needs and level of technical ability, setting it up and finally using it.

Finding the Right Wiki System

There are quite a few wiki engines out there. The original wiki site has a list of what's available at: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines. After trying a few, for purposes of writing this how-to, I narrowed it down to three. They are all written in PHP and one of them uses MySQL to store the pages. The other two use flat-file databases. They are:

Any one of these three wiki engines will serve your needs just fine. If you're the type that feels better knowing your data is stored in a database system like MySQL, then PHP Wiki is your best bet. If you're looking for ease of installation, then either PmWiki or QWikiWiki will do nicely. They both work out of the box and no database set up is required. They store their data in flat text files.

Install and Set Up

It's not complicated to set up these three wiki engines. PHP Wiki requires some extra steps if you want MySQL support. Here are some of my observations about getting them to work.

PHP Wiki

As I mentioned above, PHP Wiki offers MySQL support. This is not particularly hard to use if, of course, you've got MySQL available for you. The documentation provides explains quite well how to set it up. Nevertheless, I had a couple of gotchas and had to do it twice before I was successful.

First, you should create a MySQL user that PHP Wiki will use to access the database. This user should have permissions to create and delete (known as 'dropping') databases and tables. Refer to MySQL's documentation about adding new users. Don't forget to issue the command: FLUSH PRIVILEGES; when you've finished creating this user. After this, you're free to follow the install directions provided with PHP Wiki. Also, make sure that you make a few changes in the config.php file provided. $ScriptUrl and $AdminUrl have to point to the server where you have your wiki. That is, I had to put: http://servername/phpwiki/index.php and http://servername/phpwiki/admin.php respectively or this defaulted to localhost and things got messed up. Your browser will look for localhost and not for the actually machine the wiki's on. Also, put an admin user name and password in admin.php right away. This is for the administration of the wiki site. If you pay attention to these things, all should go smoothly.

Qwikiwiki

This wiki engine requires no database, so it works out of the box. However, one thing is very important. You need to either give write permissions to everybody for its /data and /backup directories, or if you consider that a security problem, you can have the Apache webserver (usually called 'www-data' or 'httpd') own those directories. That is:

chown -R www-data:www-data /data /backup

Then just point your web browser to where you installed it and the install wizard will take over. It will ask you a couple of questions and ask you to try out the email functions. Then you're all set to start using it.

PmWiki

PmWiki also works pretty much out of the box, but directory permission changes similar to Qwikiwiki are needed. You can have a look at the PmWiki installation page at: http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/Installation

In the end, I chose PmWiki to work with on a day to day basis. That's not to slight the others, which are also very good, but PmWiki had a combination of pleasing look, ease of use and other factors that made me stay with it. As my wiki as going to be a personal one, I was able to install a plug-in to also use the wiki as a calendar application. It was fairly easy to get this going in PmWiki.