What is DokuWiki

DokuWiki, in a nutshell, is a software package that allows you to create an online wiki.

In more detail, DokuWiki is an open source software package written in PHP and meant to be used as a wiki. It is free to download and install on any server (public or private) and use indefinitely to create any website you want. The vast majority of DokuWiki sites are wikis, but it can also be used as a CMS to create a “static site.”

The prsnl10 Template has a section called Sites using this Template with a list of simple static sites using that template, and you can see here a screenshot of the author’s own site, which uses this template.

Why Use DokuWiki

Why should you prefer DokuWiki over MediaWiki? That’s a very valid question, as MediaWiki is indeed several times more popular than DokuWiki.

For a more brief answer, DokuWiki is flexible and customizable, but it’s still very easy to install and to use. It doesn’t even require a database — all data are stored as text files. That means all user logins and site configuration and wiki page content and revisions etc. — everything is stored as flat files on your server. Backing up and restoring data is thus a breeze.

But what’s more important is the ease of use for regular day-to-day activities, like creating and editing and maintaining a wiki site. Configuration and user permissions and ACL and other administrative tasks are far easier with DokuWiki. Installing plugins and themes can be done all from within the web interface, just by cliking a few buttons, with no need to download or upload files.

Even upgrading DokuWiki can be done from within the web interface with a few clicks.

For a more detailed comparison see our DokuWiki vs MediaWiki page.

Installation

Installing DokuWiki is a breeze. See our How to Install DokuWiki page for full details.

Base Features

The most basic feature of DokuWiki is to create and maintain a wiki, which means any visitor or user, who has permission, can create/edit/delete pages on your wiki via the browser.

DokuWiki has built-in ACL (Access Control Lists) features to allow you to set and manage which users and user groups have access to what parts of the site.

The software has been translated into over 50 languages.

Plugins

There are over 1000 plugins for DokuWiki, although not all are maintained nor usable with the latest version of DokuWiki. You can visit the DokuWiki.org Plugins page to list them all, and we will discuss here some more popular or interesting ones.

The upgrade Plugin is for sure the most important and useful tool we know of. It is the most popular plugin and it’s always up to date and always supported. With it, you can upgrade your core DokuWiki site with just a few clicks from within the website itself.

Templates

There are over 100 templates for DokuWiki, although again, not all are maintained nor usable with the latest version of DokuWiki. You can visit the DokuWiki.org Templates to get an idea.

The most popular is the Bootstrap3 Template as this isn’t a “ready to use” template in reality. It’s meant to be a base upon which you can build a custom template.

On our main DokuWiki page, we spoke about the unique prsnl10 Template, which is meant for static sites (not for wikis).

Sample Sites

The OpenWrt Project is ” a Linux operating system targeting embedded devices” and their main site uses DokuWiki:

In Addition

The Top Bar page tells you how to create a top navigation bar like dokuwiki.org itself has.

There is a page called Backup to S3 with script and directions how to backup your entire wiki to Amazon S3.

How Do I Use It?

First step is to see our Getting Started with DokuWiki page for the basics.

Hosting

We at CiviHosting are experts at hosting DokuWiki — see our DokuWiki Hosting page for full details.