DokuWiki is a wiki software written in PHP providing this wiki. Besides low system requirements, easy installation and usage, it is highly extensible via plugins and can be customized to become a handy tool for documentation purposes as well as for knowledge transfer. At least this is how I try to share IT knowledge and details about (self-hosting) web services, for example.

Basic setup instructions may be found in the official installation guide and in DokuWiki — UberLab 7 documentation.

This article is about advanced configuration options used in this wiki instance.

To change default behaviour and rewrite https://example.org/doku.php?id=page to https://example.org/page you need to enable URL rewriting in /DOCUMENT_ROOT/conf/local.php/ file by appending:

$conf['userewrite'] = 1;
$conf['useslash'] = 1;

This can also be done in Configuration Settings via Admin page.

Next step is to rename /DOCUMENT_ROOT/.htaccess.dist to /DOCUMENT_ROOT/.htaccess and edit that file. First uncomment:

#RewriteEngine On

by deleting the # character at the beginning of the line and insert:

RewriteBase /

between RewriteEngine On and first RewriteRule directive. Finally uncomment all of the following rewrite rules and save changes.

Special characters should be handled safe to avoid long or corrupt filenames. Edit DOCUMENT_ROOT/conf/local.php/ by appending:

$conf['fnencode'] = 'safe';

DokuWiki is able to link the username to its namespace for providing homepages of users. This is done by setting showuseras = username_link either in the configuration file mentioned above or using the option User's full name as interwiki user links on the Admin page.

Template Style Settings may be used to select different colors for wiki appearance. After saving changes an upgrade-safe file is written to /DOCUMENT_ROOT/conf/tpl/<template_name>/style.ini.

While the standard template is not intended to be used with inverted colors (light text on dark background), the Darkblue Template might be used as foundation and customizations are written to: /DOCUMENT_ROOT/conf/tpl/darkblue/style.ini.

When using syntax highlightning in dokuwiki you need to overwrite some CSS classes for font colors to work on a dark background. Create a userstyle.css file containing the following rules:

.kw2 {
  color: #888 !important;
}
.kw3 {
  color: #0000cc !important;
}
.re5 {
  color: #810040 !important;
}

When writing about technical stuff, there are a lot of abbreviations concerned. To incorporate them without dealing with syntax every time, you can define a list in conf/abbreviations.local.conf file as described in official documentation and must purge the cache afterwards. The AcronymEdit Plugin adds an abbreviations editor to the Admin page.

To increase security for user login 2FA can be employed by installing the Attribute Plugin, Two Factor Authentication - Core Plugin and Two Factor Authentication - Google Authenticator Plugin. The latter is the actual authenticator application to generate a token. Although the name implies using the Google Authenticator app, a password database management software like KeePassXC provides that feature, too. Refer to its user guide for more information on adding TOTP to an entry.

Following a list of plugins I found useful for building this site:

• Cloud Plugin 2022-09-28 by Michael Hamann, Michael Klier, Gina Haeussge
  Displays the most used words in a word cloud.
• Info Plugin 2020-06-04 by Andreas Gohr
  Displays information about various DokuWiki internals
• nspages plugin 2023-05-29 by Guillaume Turri
  Presents a toc of the selected namespace using <nspages>
• Pagelist Plugin 2022-09-28 by Matthias Schulte, Michael Hamann, Michael Klier, Gina Haeussge
  Lists pages in a nice formatted way
• Tag Plugin 2023-05-25 by Michael Hamann, Gina Häussge, Christopher Smith, Michael Klier, Esther Brunner
  tag wiki pages

• Attribute Plugin 2022-04-07 by CosmoCode & Michael Wilmes
  Arbitrary attribute definition and storage for user associated data.
• cleanup plugin 2016-07-06 by Andreas Gohr
  Perform file cleanup in the wiki
• Extension Manager 2015-07-26 by Michael Hamann
  Allows managing and installing plugins and templates
• Pagelist Plugin 2022-09-28 by Matthias Schulte, Michael Hamann, Michael Klier, Gina Haeussge
  Lists pages in a nice formatted way
• Tag Plugin 2023-05-25 by Michael Hamann, Gina Häussge, Christopher Smith, Michael Klier, Esther Brunner
  tag wiki pages
• Titles Anchor Link plugin 2021-21-23 by Dric
  Displays Anchors links when hovering Dokuwiki Sections titles, in a similar way to Github.
• DokuWiki Upgrade Plugin 2023-04-12 by Andreas Gohr
  Automatically upgrade your DokuWiki install to the most recent stable release

Category: Services