Installation
This page presumes you already have DokuWiki installed and working. If not, see our How to Install DokuWiki page. The last step there is how to login, so we will carry on here from that step.
Edit the Home Page
To get to your home page, either click the red “start” link or click on the DokuWiki logo on the top left of your site. Then you will see the “This topic does not exist yet” message:
To create the page, put your mouse on the pencil icon on the far right side of the page (directly to the right of “This topic does not exist yet”) and a little menu will popup saying that the pencil is the “Create this page” link. Click on that.
You can now enter some text and click Save at the bottom. Once you do that, you have a home page:
We will discuss later how to add formatting and links and images etc.
Create New Pages
A wiki with just one page isn’t very exciting nor interesting. So let’s make a page. I want a page called, let’s say Pink Elephants. There are a few ways to start — all of them are just ways to vist the URL of that page on my site. Here are a few ways:
Create a link to the new page
You can manually create a link to your new page on another page and then click that link to get to the new URL. See below for how to create a link.
Search for the new page
If you type Pink Elephants in the search box on the top right of your page and click the magnifying class, you will get a page like this:
Now you can just click on that red pink_elephants link to visit your new page.
Add New Page Plugin
There is also the Add New Page Plugin for those who appreciate things being a bit easier.
Manually Visit the URL
If your site’s default configuration has not been changed (or your server doesn’t support “Nice URLs”) then the default URL system is mysite/doku.php?id=PAGENAME so I thus would enter into my browser address bar:
mysite.com/doku.php?id=Pink Elephants
If your site has been configured to use “Nice URLs” then the URL would be:
mysite.com/Pink Elephants
When I do that, I see again that same “This topic does not exist yet” message. Now I know what to do — I just click the pencil icon and create my page.
The only thing to note here is that after I create my page, I see that DokuWiki has changed the Pink Elephants part of the URL to be just pink_elephants. That’s because DokuWiki doesn’t allow capital letters or spaces (or other special characters) in page names.
But that’s OK — I don’t mind — the main thing is that I have my page done now.
Create a Side Bar
To create the sidebar you need to create a page called sidebar. Whatever text or links or images you put there will appear on the left sidebar of every page of your site. See below for how to create links:
Create Links
You can have external links or internal links in DokuWiki. An external link means a link to another website and an internal link is a link to your site.
Both work the same way in reality:
External Link
To make a simple link, just enclose it with [[ and ]]. So to link to https://civihosting.com/ you would use this code:
[[https://civihosting.com/]]
which will show a link like this:
In order to change the visible text, you must add a special “pipe” character which looks like this | and then the text. So to link to https://civihosting.com/ and display “My Host” on that link you would use:
[[https://civihosting.com/|My Host]]
which will show a link like this:
Internal Link
Internal links are even easier. A simple link just has page title:
[[pink_elephants]]
which will show a link like this:
To change the text, again use the pipe character:
[[pink_elephants|Pink Elephant Page]]
which will show a link like this:
That’s the basics. For a few more options see the Link page on dokuwiki.org.
Images and Media
Forthcoming…
Hosting
We at CiviHosting are experts at hosting DokuWiki — see our DokuWiki Hosting page for full details.