Blog:SLUG/Dokuwiki for collaborative documentation

I have been wanting to start documenting my projects that I have been working on for quite a while now. I have networking equipment and computers, configuration files and numerous websites with admin links. The problem was I could never figure out the best way to go about doing this.

--more--

Some people keep text files inside of directories. In school we were taught to just keep everything in a word document and print it out to be placed in a 3 ring binder. Those options were not too appealing to me. After doing some research and asking around a lot of people pointed to Dokuwiki.

To quote the dokuwiki.org website: "DokuWiki is a standards compliant, simple to use Wiki, mainly aimed at creating documentation of any kind. It is targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies. It has a simple but powerful syntax which makes sure the datafiles remain readable outside the Wiki and eases the creation of structured texts. All data is stored in plain text files – no database is required."

The part about the data files being readable outside of the Wiki and no database being required is what sold me. It was very quick and easy to set up. All I had to do was extract it into a directory on an existing web server. The only thing that was not completely automatic about this was having to manually change the permissions on a few directories so that they were writable by the web server.

Dokuwiki can easily be configured as a personal wiki, a collaboration with user management, or completely open. This was set with a drop down during installation.

Another thing that I thought was neat was that some people keep a copy on their desktop and another copy on their notebook. You can use a sync plugin that allows you to keep the two copies synchronized.

Perhaps I will demonstrate this at our next meeting. I would love to hear how others tackle documentation.