Figuring that MediaWiki was probably overkill for this project, I struck out in search of something that would be easier to install and configure for me, and easier for non-technical users to maintain. What I found was DokuWiki, a somewhat minimalistic wiki platform that explicitly aims to fulfill the documentation needs of “developer teams, workgroups, and small companies.” Perfect!

As I soon discovered, one of DokuWiki’s distinguishing features is that it does not make use of a database for storage, as so many other wikis and content management systems do. This makes installation incredibly simple right off the bat: Just drop the files in a directory on your web server and go. All of your pages are stored as plain text files (e.g. another_wiki_page.txt)  in a directory hierarchy that matches the hierarchy of “namespaces” you create on the wiki. In this way, your content remains organized and perfectly readable even when you take the wiki software out of the equation.

For the most part, DokuWiki’s syntax is pleasant and sensical. Instead of MediaWiki’s odd multiple-single-quotes scheme, you have //slashes// for emphasis and **asterisks** for strong emphasis, which feels more intuitive. Instead of MediaWiki’s bizarre syntax differences between internal and external links, DokuWiki treats them all the same: [[link_target|Link Text]]. But then again, there are some strange and arbitrary syntax decisions on DokuWiki’s side, like the fact that the largest headings are surrounded by ======Six Equals Signs======, and the number of equals signs goes down by one for each sub-heading level. Weird, though I suppose it’s in the name of plain-text readability.

Uploading images and other files to DokuWiki is a breeze, thanks to a pop-up media manager that includes a multi-file Flash uploader and can insert wiki-links to your files with a click. Nifty media icons abound in DokuWiki’s output, with PDF files, Word documents, and more each getting their own instantly-recognizable icons. External links and email addresses also get unique icons, making them stand out nicely on the page. The “pretty by default” approach extends to text, which gets automatic curly quotes and various other typographic entities in much the same way that WordPress output does.

Given that I’m using DokuWiki for documentation on a company intranet, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention what an absolute cakewalk it is to integrate your own authentication scheme into it. If you already have a table of users in a database somewhere, as I did, you can set up DokuWiki to authenticate against it in the time it takes you to write a couple of SQL queries. There are other built-in authentication modules you can use, and if none of them meet your needs, writing your own is surprisingly easy (and well-documented) if you have a decent knowledge of PHP. There is also a fairly comprehensive ACL system that becomes much more useful if you set up your authentication scheme to provide “groups” to DokuWiki, or if you’re using the built-in mechanism.

One downside I’ve encountered in terms of usability is DokuWiki’s strict adherence to a particular naming convention for both page names and media file names: Only lowercase letters, periods, dashes, and underscores are permitted. The aesthetics of this decision leave something to be desired, especially since the name of the page you’re on is (at least in the default theme) displayed at the top in very large text, and probably:looks:ugly_as_sin. I’m not sure why capital letters and spaces are disallowed, since they are both quite safe to put in a filename. You can set an option to superficially replace the ugly page names with the contents of the first heading on the page in question, but this just makes the page’s “real name” harder to discover when you have to link to it, and the visual duplication of the page title and the first heading is far from nice-looking.

Thankfully, DokuWiki presents itself very well in all other aspects, and the overall package has so many good things going for it that I can’t help but give it my recommendation. If you want a lightweight, documentation-oriented wiki that feels almost as slick as WordPress but gives off a more techy vibe, DokuWiki can definitely take you there.