Help and Information

Getting Started

• Wiki is easy and safe: it’s designed for writers and you can’t break it.
• The edit password is [private]. The site is password-protected primarily to stop spambots. The entire site, any group or any page can be secured with passwords for reading, editing and administration or left completely open.
• Sign and date-stamp your name with four tildes ~~~~. This uses the contents of the “Author” field.
• Sign without a date-stamp with three tildes ~~~.
• If you put your name in the Author field, others will know who did what and when.
• Create a new page by making an internal link, then click on the link.
• Make an internal link by enclosing the page name in square brackets: [[Page Name]].
• In links, spaces and punctuation usually don’t count; spelling and capitalization do.
• Make an external link by enclosing the url, including http://, in double square brackets:
  [[ http://www.wikwik.com/photobook ]].
• Groups: Every page is in a group; the default group is “Main”. There are also groups for Production, Distribution etc.
• A page name by itself in a link defaults to the group the page is in. If you want or need to specify a group (in a link), do this;
  Group/PageName or Group.PageName.
• Create a new group the same way you create a new page, by specifying it in a link: [[New Group.New Page]] creates “New Page” in “New Group”.
• If you want a link to display differently than the page name or url itself, use a “pipe link”:
  [[Page Name | Different Name for this Page]].
• !, !!, !!! etc. at the left margin create headings.
• *, **, *** etc. at the left margin creates an unordered list, bullets.
• #, ##, ### etc. at the left margin creates an ordered list, numbers.
• ' (single quote) around text creates emphasized text: '' (2) for italic; ''' (3) for bold; ''''' (5) for bold italic.
• ---- (four hyphens) on a line by itself creates a horizontal rule.
• Use the History link to roll back to an earlier version, or roll forward to a later version.
• Don’t type spaces at the left margin unless you want unformatted text.
• If you have questions, suggestion or problems, contact Kevin Hayes.

Basic PmWiki Documentation

PmWiki is a wiki-based system for collaborative creation and maintenance of websites.

PmWiki pages look and act like normal web pages, except they have an “Edit” link that makes it easy to modify existing pages and add new pages into the website, using basic editing rules. You do not need to know or use any HTML or CSS. Page editing can be left open to the public or restricted to small groups of authors.

• Basic Editing
• Documentation Index
• PmWiki FAQ
• PmWiki Philosophy

Key PmWiki Features

PmWiki is written in PHP and distributed under the General Public License. It is designed to be simple to install, customize, and maintain for a variety of applications. This site is running pmwiki-2.1.27.

PmWiki is a registered trademark of Patrick R. Michaud.

PmWiki’s home on the web is at pmwiki.org.

PmWiki Philosophy

1. Favor writers over readers

At its heart, PmWiki is a collaborative authoring system for hyperlinked documents. It’s hard enough to get people (including Pm) to contribute written material; making authors deal with HTML markup and linking issues places more obstacles to active contribution. So, PmWiki aims to make it easier to author documents, even if doing so limits the types of documents being authored.

2. Don’t try to replace HTML

PmWiki doesn’t make any attempt to do everything that can be done in HTML. There are good reasons that people don’t use web browsers to edit HTML—it’s just not very effective. If you need to be writing lots of funky HTML in a web page, then PmWiki is not what you should be using to create it. What PmWiki does try to do is make it easy to link PmWiki to other “non-wiki” web documents, to embed PmWiki pages inside of complex web pages, and to allow other web documents to easily link to PmWiki.

3. Avoid gratuitous features (or “creeping featurism”)

In general PmWiki features are implemented in response to specific needs, rather than because someone identifies something that “might be useful”. In any sort of useful system, it’s hard to change a poorly designed feature once people have built a lot of structure based on it. (Need an example? Look at MS-DOS or Windows.) One way to avoid poor design is to resist the temptation to implement something until you have a clearer idea of how it will be used.

4. Support collaborative maintenance of public web pages

Although this wasn’t at all the original intent of PmWiki, it became quickly obvious that WikiWikiWeb principles could be used to make it easier for groups to collaboratively design and maintain a public web site presence. PmWiki allows individual pages to be password protected, and a couple of local customizations makes it easy to protect large sections of PmWiki pages. Furthermore, in many ways PmWiki provides “style sheets on steroids”: you can quickly change the headers, footers, and other elements on a large group of pages without ever having to touch the individual page contents. Finally, it’s relatively easy to add custom markup for specialized applications.

5. Be easy to install, configure, and maintain

With a compressed gzip file size of just around 200K, uploading PmWiki to your server is a speedy operation. Do a chmod or two, update a few settings in config.php and you should be up and running. PmWiki stores all data in flat files, so there is no need for MySQL or other utilities. Upgrading is usually a simple matter of copying the latest version’s files over the files of your existing PmWiki installation.