Collaborating with Wikis

The WikiWikiWeb, taken from the Hawaiian expression for fast, quick, or speedy, was created by Ward Christopher as a way of tapping into the collective knowledge of his circle of friends and co-workers. It combines features of email lists, software documentation tools, and the simple structure of the Web to generate useful, accessible, and frequently updated and reviewed information.

The idea caught on, and people are collaborating with Wikis in all sorts of ways. The best known example of a successful and popular Wiki is Wikipedia.org. Its goal is to produce a basic compendium of human knowledge about most anything. As of February 2005, the English version of Wikipedia was approaching 500,000 articles produced, with at least some articles in some 20 other languages. It has spawned other projects, including WikiQuotes, the Wiktionary, and the Wikinews citizen journalism project.

Dozens of packages have been written to create Wikis with. These packages, called WikiEngines, have varying features. Like blog software, one WikiEngine should meet your needs and idiosyncrasies. Wikipedia uses the MediaWiki engine. SUSE Linux comes with one engine, the Zope-based ZWiki engine. Other engines are easy to get, with varying degrees of installation difficulty. See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChoosingaWiki for help in selecting a package.

ZWiki

This package builds Wiki functioning on the Zope web application server package. Zope (the Z Object Publishing Environment) was built as an object-oriented tool for creating dynamic websites. It includes a content management framework, its own relational database (and works with other database management systems) and other publishing tools. It is written mostly in the Python scripting language.

Getting ZWiki up and running is a two-step process because you need Zope first. Get Zope installed via YaST, and then go to the Runlevel Editor in YaST (see Chapter 22, "Managing the Boot Process and Other Services," for more information on the Runlevel Editor) to turn on Zope.

Download the latest ZWiki version from http://zwiki.org. New versions are generally released once a month. Extract the tarball to /var/opt/zope/default/Products and then reboot the system to launch Zope.

Open a web browser to http://localhost:8080, and you should see the Zope welcome message. Click the link for the Zope Management Interface. You'll be asked for a username and password. The SUSE Engineers have created a default user, which is the information you should use the first time. Username: superuser, Password: 123.

From the main screen, use the Select Type to Add drop-down menu to Add ZWiki. Click Add. Figure 16.5 appears.

Figure 16.5. Use the Zope Management Interface to add a ZWiki Web.

Give an ID name for the ZMI and a title for your Wiki. Click Create Wiki (and Enter). You'll see the default page in the default skin (see Figure 16.6).

Figure 16.6. The basic ZWiki template appears when you create a new ZWiki.

Click the Edit link to replace the default text with your own (see Figure 16.7).

Figure 16.7. Start typing new material in your WikiEdit page.

Note

Learn more about Zope in Chapter 26, "Managing Your Apache Web Server."

ZWiki is flexible in the types of text you can input. It can read and interpret standard HTML, Zope's Document Template Markup Language (DTML), StructuredText (Zope's attempt to simplify the XML documentation standard DocBook for engineers), and standard WikiWikiWeb markup. The latter, which creates a page link for all words with capitals placed inside the word (like WikiWikiWeb or WhyWikiWorks), can be simultaneously very cool and very frustrating.

Note

As was mentioned earlier, ZWiki was discussed only because it ships with SUSE Linux. Many other packages/WikiEngines are available and you will want to use the one that best meets your needs. Visit http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChoosingaWiki to select a package for your implementation if you want to use something other than ZWiki.