Re: Self-hosted DokuWiki Software Import

Marc M

Over the last few weeks I have learned a lot about Dokuwiki. 
Previously (as some of your know) I set up a migration to a Wordpress installation - which I was quite proud of.  The process wasn't too bad and the result looked and worked great. 

Unfortunately the editing process seemed complicated to people, even though it's pretty basic WYSIWYG editing.  Plus with nearly 900 pages it put a bit of a load on the shared and leased server.  

So I once again went through the various pieces of Open Source and free wiki software and kept coming back to Dokuwiki.  
The formatting is a bit simple but straightforward for other's to use, and since it doesn't use a MYSQL database or any database for that matter, it runs pretty smoothly on anything, even with lots of pages.  Unfortunately it was a bit more work to migrate into it and I had to use more search and replace en masse in a multi-file text editor and lots of complicated search expressions.  Finding ones that worked took the most time, once they did the editor replaced everyone in all 800+ files in less time than it took to take a sip of coffee.  I had to do some of the same replacements as for migration to Wordpress and then lots more.

The nice thing about Dokuwiki is that the wiki pages are stored in .txt files that you can easily FTP in and out of it.  Find that you need a tweak on a couple hundred pages?  No problem, make the changes to the local copies with the search and replace on an editor across all of the files that need editing, and then re-upload.

I tried to keep some notes on the process but unfortunately I didn't keep very good ones this time around.  If others are interested I can post my notes here and some other observations on conversion. 

I have much more to fix, like formatting and such but got the basics done.  I am running it on a few different servers for testing - my own, a friend's, and a couple free hosting sites even.  Here's one on a free site as a test -

So as not scare away some of our contributors I have made it look as close to Wikispaces as possible.

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