So you want to fix up a mistake in the hp8100 workshops? Or make your own workshop series based on new hardware? Add a new guide to some cool bit of software? It's time to customise your wiki.

For the rest of this guide we assume you have downloaded and installed a copy of this wiki, following this guide.

You should be logged into your wiki as admin, and have access to the /dokuwiki directory from a terminal.

After testing most of the available options, we decided to use Dokuwiki. Dokuwiki is simple to edit, maintain and back-up. It doesn't require a database for installation and can be edited from any modern web browser. Most importantly, dokuwiki can be distributed freely and easily.

The CCC wiki uses a custom template and has a few extensions installed to make the workshop presentation and content generation easier.

The first step to customising your CCC wiki is to learn more about dokuwiki. The dokuwiki site and https://forum.dokuwiki.org/forums are informative and helpful.

We will take a quick look the standard dokuwiki syntax as well as some of the plug-ins and customisations we are using. For reference, you can find the complete dokuwiki manual here.

Dokuwiki uses text files with a simple syntax for generating HTML. This means instead of typing raw HTML, you can use shortcuts to write your pages.

For example, the equal = sign is used to create headings.

Six equal signs around text turns that text into the biggest heading. ====== This is a big Heading ====== looks like

The dokuwiki syntax keeps our documentation source in text format, which should be easily readable, ready to be converted to any other format imaginable. With a bit of practice you will be quicker using the syntax than the editor tool buttons.

There is a built-in syntax reference here, which is also accessible from the sitemap. We will now run through the basics of editing, creating and copying pages (and namespaces).

To edit a whole page, use the edit page tool on the right hand side,

or in the page tools menu at the top of the page.

This will open dokuwikis built in editor….

You can also edit just sections of a page by clicking on the edit button below each section.

The editor has a built in tool menu, where you can click and add formatting.

Or you can add formatting directly once you learn the markup.

Once you are done with your edits, click the save button.

If you would like to preview your changes, click preview and scroll down.

Say for example you want to update a picture used in a workshop or add in a new picture. We can use the 'add image' button on the toolbar.

This opens a new window with the media manager.

Find the picture you want to upload.

Creating a page is as simple as making an internal link in an existing page with the editor. To make a link you can use the square brackets

   [[ :mynewpage ]]
   

or use the internal link button in the editor.

Make a Link

The link then appears as red, which means it doesn't yet exist.

Your wiki will prompt you to use create page button the create it.

Before you create a page, decide which namespace you want to put it in. Think of namespaces as folders or directories.

For example the hp8100 namespace contains all the pages for the hp8100 workshops. To create a new page called newpage in this space I would use this syntax.

 [[hp8100:newpage]]
 

The : is used to separate between namespaces and pages. If you use just one : then you are creating a page in the root names space.

 [[:apageintheroot]]

The item after the last ':' is always a page, and dokuwiki doesn't try to correct your spelling, so take care when typing namespaces and page names! For example;

[[namepsace1:namespace2:apage]]
[[namespace1:namespace2:apage]]

Creates four namespaces and two pages. Can you spot why?

Once your page is created, it will appear in the sitemap, which is accesible from the top page tools menu. Its a good idea to check this to make sure your page is where you think it is!


To make your new page easy to find, you can add it to the sidebar - a special page that appears on the left of your wiki. Go to the sidebar page.

sidebar

Notice how the sidebar content looks the same as the page content?

You just need to add an internal wiki link to the page you want.The easy way to do this is with the internal link button in the editor

internal link

You can then make an un-ordered list - use an asterisk to make a top level menu item, then further nested asterisks, to make a list like this:

unorded list in sitemap

You will have noticed that the first two workshops in the series refer to specific hardware.

What if you want to use the HP8100 workshops as a basis for a new series with new hardware?

Because Dokuwiki keeps all its pages as text files in folders, we can cheat and just copy the entire /workshop_template folder to a new folder. To test this out we'll pretend we have a workshop based on the hp280. Lets do this from the command line.

Open a terminal, and lets find your dokuwiki pages directory. If you installed the wiki using our guide, then is will be at;

 /var/www/dokuwiki/data/pages
 

use the ls command to find the contents of the directory.

 ls -al /var/www/dokuwiki/data/pages
 

You will see something like:

terminal window

First lets change into the directory using cd.

 cd /var/www/dokuwiki/data/pages/

Now you can use the copy command with a couple of flags to make sure we preserve permissions and copy the directory contents to our new directory. We will need to be sudo to do this.

  sudo cp -ar  hp8100/ hp280/

Now to check the files have copied over, you can try

ls -al hp280/
ls -al hp8100/

You should see the same files in each.

Now that the files in the directory, you can visit your sitemap in the site tools menu at the top left.

site tools

And click the sitemap - you should see your new workshop namespace.

sitemap

We should rename the pages in our new namespace to the reflect the new computer we are using. Lets do this starting from the sitemap, and open up the first page to be renamed.

open new page

Then go to the floating toolbar on the right and select the renamepage tool.

rename page button

And in the pop-up window rename the fileto hp280:hp280 ;

Finally to make your new workshop pages easy to find - lets add them to the sidebar. Using the same method as we did earlier. Your new sidebar will look like this.

add to sidebar

  • ttt/ccc_wiki
  • by Andrei Maberley