Improving Things Continues

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Today I worked on some really nice thing in Wikidot, which finally makes initial database dump more organized. Instead of one big single-wiki-dump.sql there are 6 files:

• 0-schema.sql
• 1-users.sql
• 2-licenses.sql
• 3-themes.sql
• 4-main-site.sql
• 5-template-site.sql

The fact that they are split is a bit artificial, because they are all executed at once, but still it is nice to have 6 shorter files than one long. In case we want to add a new license to the initial dump, we don't need to search and be really careful to not break anything else. We just edit licenses file.

Site Update

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I found that for some reason commenting was disabled for blog category. I am sorry about that. I enabled it back.

Also we wanted to make a comparison of Wikidot and other wiki engines, and we wanted to do it the wiki way, so we created a wiki page for this: Comparison to other wiki engines. Everyone can edit! Feel invited.

The current state of Wikidot

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Currently, Wikidot software is meant as just a wiki engine. "Just", because it used to be a complete wiki farm solution. Actually it's kind of both, but from start you get just a wiki, which makes it so easy to install.

After you get the dependencies and the Wikidot source, you need to prepare a database and populate it. Normally this means two make commands (one for postgres user and second for your regular user). The default configuration options are to provide you a simple single-wiki engine, that just works. This means, that however you connect to Wikidot (with any IP or DNS name), you get the single wiki that you created. Wikidot needs a full namespace of URLs (starting from /), so you can't simply put it along with other web applications. This is why by default we use port 8080 for serving Wikidot. Also as we rely on very custom Lighttpd configuration, we supply a config file for it (that is partially generated when doing make). But don't worry, we also have a script that let's you control it. ./wikidotctl start starts Wikidot's Lighttpd, ./wikidotctl stop stops it. Pretty straight-forward, isn't it?

But Wikidot software is also a full-featured wiki-farm solution. But you need a different database dump (that adds more wikis, like template wiki for each newly created wiki) and a different configuration. First of all, you need a full domain name namespace (for example *.mywikidot.mycompany.com). What's before .mywikidot.mycompany.com in the domain name is the name of wiki, so if you connect to abc.mywikidot.mycompany.com displayed is abc wiki. Also as this gets a bit complicated to deal with when having custom port, you need to run the Lighttpd on port 80 (the standard WWW port). This means, if you want to host a full wiki farm, you need to have a separate IP address just for Wikidot (any other web server can be run on a non-standard port only), and a root access to start Lighttpd (only root can bind to ports smaller than 1024).

Actually you need quite a lot knowledge to understand what the wiki-farm-mode Wikidot does and to configure it, but once you get it, it's quite easy. Anyway, all I want to say, is that we want to ease the simplest (and most common) installation of Wikidot. If you want to have a wiki, but want to host it yourself rather that on Wikidot.com, this is done just for you, just get the dependencies, Wikidot sources, prepare database, make and you're done. No need for painful configuration :).