GuineaPig DokuWiki!

You all should know that the purpose of my studies at Reykjavik University is to be able to make the best localized information website about guinea pigs! There is such a lack of information that has been translated and easily available, so I had alot of fun creating such a source of information because of my web related hobbies.

Have been considering trying out DokuWiki as a base for the information, since it's a wiki that does not require a database (I do have a database, but it just feels like such a small sized project to require a database to store the information, it is currently just pure html and php pages, my first attempt at playing with the modularity of php at the time, having the header as and footer as something I could import).

The formatting syntax seems to be a hybrid of what you'd expect on mediawiki and discord.

Update

I found a very handly program (provided by dokuwiki) that allows you to transform html into dokuwiki syntax, which made it a whole lot easier to convert my website into a dokuwiki.

You can also embed HTML code into the pages, but it's disabled by default (then it just shows you the code instead of rendering it).  This let me keep my more complex tables from the original, and even add a style tag. Was having bit of trouble importing javascript to use (for sortable table), so that's out for the moment.

Found a nice template (theme) that mimics the Vector theme from mediawiki, the html structure was a bit odd (I was trying to adjust the style a bit for myself), so I resorted to simply using CSS grid to put everything where I wanted in the layout, this allowed me to easily move things around to create a responsive theme. Haven't fine tuned it further.

But this update to the grisanaggar website makes it easier to add new information and change it, provides a search feature for words, and I could even let other people have accounts to edit the content to keep things updated.  The easy inter-wiki links also makes things very nice and connected, don't have to think about where the page is located in my folder structure, just link to it's name.

The website was previously my first experiment with PHP to import headers and footers, the body of the pages was just pure html. So it was a very static website.

First impression of DokuWiki

I really like the simplicity of how it just has directories as namespaces, and you just reference them in a similar manner as you would with mediawiki. All pages would be in the 'pages' directory, and any sub directories there are extra namespaces, the 'wiki' directory would be referenced 'wiki:pagename'

The headings are a bit backwards, '====== heading ======' would be h1, '== heading ==' would be h5 (the lowest you can go with the doku syntax). I see no reason why they had to be so backwards, but I guess there is no changing that now.

Making a bullet list is annoying, it wasn't until I used the html to dokuwiki converter that I figured out what I was doing wrong. You have to have exactly 2 spaces before the * in order for it to convert to a bullet point, and for sub-bullets you just add further 2 spaces and so on. Simple enough, but I really wanted it to just be more like how markdown did things.

The ability to embed html and php code directly is neat, but as I mentioned, it's disabled by default

Overall, it's a super nice little wiki that stores things as files instead of on a database, but still manages to keep track of changes done to articles through the website (if you are editing the files through ftp, then it just counts as a external update and kind of clears the history).  You might not notice that you weren't working on a mediawiki when editing content on the dokuwiki if you have the Vector theme on, heh.

I like having the control of all the content being files, it makes it simpler to backup and store the whole wiki, perfect for little projects like this translated guinea pig info site, and you can actually add plugins/extensions to add features such as the imagebox to get a nice frame and caption on the images (exactly like mediawiki), and the gallery plugin that just lets you link to a specific media folder and it just shows you the thumbnails of everything within that folder.