Frequently Asked Questions

I try to answer some common questions here. You can use the discussion page to ask questions not answered here, or simply write to andi@splitbrain.org.

Lets see what I can make up

• It support multiple ways of including code examples
• It’s easy to create structured documents
• The datafiles are readable even if your Server goes down (see DB question below)
• maybe more I can’t remember

Just remove the write permissions for the webserver on that particular file. eg:

chmod 644 file.txt

DokuWiki uses the charset specified in the selected language file. The selected encoding is sent in the documents meta headers and used as accept-encoding in the edit formular.

If you want to change to a different encoding like unicode it should be enough to reencode all the language files and change the $lang[encoding] variable. DokuWiki it self does no reencoding of data sent by the browser so if the browser ignores the accept-encoding of the form there may be problems. DokuWiki wasn’t tested with anything other than iso-8859-15 so any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated. Possible options for the encoding are defined at http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets.

It would be possible, but there was a reason for not doing it. DokuWiki was designed to hold documentation of all kinds. So what do you do when your database or your webserver is down and the documentation to bring it up again is only accessable through this webserver or database? Yikes! So DokuWiki stores all this vital information as plain text which is always readable, even if you only have some tape backups left of your beloved Server .

However if you want to use a database (which has some advantages over plain text files) just do so. Have a look at the common.php in the include directory. You have to reimplement some of the functions there (like getWikiText and saveWikiText) to use your DB instead of files. If you do so be sure to share your code with all of us .

I know it’s not very Wiki-like but is it possible to restrict editing pages to special users only?

Yes you can use Apache’s auth methods to restrict POST request. Here is an example to add to your .htaccess.

<Files doku.php>
  <Limit POST>
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "You need to login to post"
    AuthUserFile /var/www/.htuser
    require valid-user
  </Limit>
</Files>

Is there an easy way to increase the maximum file upload size (currently 2 megabytes)?

The file upload size is limited in your PHP configuration php.ini with the parameter upload_max_filesize.