DokuWiki as my CMS

DokuWiki has been my choice of CMS for some time now. Whilst it is limited “Out of the box” to being a simple Wiki engine, there is a strong Plugin culture which has allowed users to expand DokuWiki’s default feature set to include photo galleries, contact pages, and blogs.

I am no CSS guru, so it is lucky that some of DokuWiki’s user-base are kind enough to create publicly available templates. By adding a logo and amending the colours a little, I have quickly created a site that is mine. Yes, it may look like a lot of other DokuWiki web sites, but this is not a disaster as DokuWiki is not ubiquitous on the web. Unlike how PHP-Nuke used to be, or say WordPress has become. This means that people using my site are unlikely to be stumbling across 100s of other DokuWiki-driven sites using the same template.

This is the value added culture that allow me to make the following statement:

DokuWiki is the best Content Management Solution available.

This may sound a little absolute. The fact is there are many fine CMS suites available. Many of which have far more features and are far more powerful then DokuWiki. And they are probably fine for large sites - requiring 1000s of pages and a database back-end - with lots of users, and lots of features. However, they all have long learning curves, are often hard to use, and are very hard to customise into an attractive web site.

Though I use a Wiki-engine to power my web site, I do not follow the wiki concept of allowing universal access to edit my pages. So to allow some user contribution to the site, it is nice that DokuWiki has a Discussion plugin. And an avatar plugin makes the comments prettier.

The 26 June is DokuWiki’s 4th birthday and Andi has challenged DokuWiki users to post a picture of a birthday cake. Apparently there’s bonus points for the right number of candles… though nothing mentioned about it having to be a real cake.

This is my contribution!