Dokuwiki Revival                                            -*-org-*-

Date: 2011/9/12

In the process of evaluating some wiki engines (see ToTry) as
candidates for my personal CMS, I thought of Dokuwiki, the system I
have set-up in my MOTD root and used actively for a month or so back
two years ago.

I'm not sure now why I abandonned Dokuwiki, though it may have been
because I didn't see a way to integrate it with my gopherhole, and
the trouble with getting all my desired navigation parts and pages
set-up in wiki format.

I remember back then being impressed, as I am now, with Dokuwiki's
rich feature set, and I have now discovered a way to make Dokuwiki
use my gopherhole file subtree as its database, so I think it's
worthwhile giving Dokuwiki another look as my web-side content
manager.

DW's biggest charm points for me:

- Documents are plain text files.

- Document content formatted for easy reading and manipulation with
  tools outside DW.

- Subdirectories supported as "namespaces".

DW has had many releases since I let my wiki languish, so rather than
upgrade the current installation I've made a separate installation
with the latest version. I'll delete the old installation when I've
completed migration.

Actually, migration is mostly done since I used the
gopherhole-serving trick to copy all DW content into green dataset.

* Gopherhole-serving trick

I renamed the DW "data" directory for safety, then created a "data"
smbolic link to the green dataset root (gopherhole root).

The DW security page lists the above as one method of securing the
data directory if .htaccess can't be used. It also indicates there is
a configuration variable that can be set any directory as the DW
DB. (Will likely use latter method for permanent installation.)

* Functional issues

Out-of-the-box DW doesn't do everything I want to do in the way I
want to do it. But it's closer than I thought it was a couple of
years ago. I feel like I can get the essential functions with just a
little hacking of plugins and/or the DW core (I'm feeling a little
more programming adventurous than before).

- DW assumes navigation primarily by internal links from other
  pages, but I rarely use internal links and want to navigate by
  directory traversal and virtual exits through nexus and rooms.

- Is it possible in DW to use different template variations for 
  nexus, rooms/namespaces/directories, and objects/pages/documents?

- Need way to bypass std. DW markup parser in favor of my
  ultra-simple text file format (first line is title (supress
  "-*-org-*-"), remainder is preformatted text).

- Multiple file extensions: txt, html, org, images, script/source ...

- Blog/RSS draws from multiple (all) namespaces.

- Integrate version control system.

- Autogenerate navigation pages and parts (nexus, room display, nav
  bar, ...)

- Comments open to non-registered users? RSS for comments?

- Port retro-green theme.