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NAME

CGI::Wiki::Kwiki - An instant wiki built on CGI::Wiki.

DESCRIPTION

A simple-to-use front-end to CGI::Wiki. It can be used for several purposes: to migrate from a CGI::Kwiki wiki (its original purpose), to provide a quickly set up wiki that can later be extended to use more of CGI::Wiki's capabilities, and so on. It uses the Template Toolkit to allow quick and easy customisation of your wiki's look without you needing to dive into the code.

INSTALLATION

The distribution ships with and installs a script called cgi-wiki-kwiki-install. Create an empty directory somewhere that your web server can see, and run the script. It will set up a SQLite database, install the default templates into the current directory, and create a cgi script to run the wiki. You now have a wiki - edit wiki.cgi to change any of the default options, and you're done.

MORE DETAILS

wiki.cgi will look something like this:

  #!/usr/bin/perl -w
  use strict;
  use warnings;
  use CGI;
  use CGI::Wiki::Kwiki;

  my %config = (
    db_type => 'SQLite',
    db_name => '/home/wiki/data/node.db',
    formatters => {
                    default => 'CGI::Wiki::Formatter::Default',
                  },
  );

  my %vars = CGI::Vars();
  eval {
      CGI::Wiki::Kwiki->new(%config)->run(%vars);
  };

  if ($@) {
      print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
      print "There was a problem with CGI::Wiki::Kwiki:\n\n--\n";
      print "$@";
      print "\n--\n";
      print STDERR $@;
  }

In the following directions, we use "webserver" to mean the user that your webserver executes CGI scripts as. Often this is actually you yourself; sometimes it is "www-data" or "apache". If you don't know, ask your ISP.

In the script above and in the following, replace /home/wiki/data/node.db with a filename in a directory that you will be able to make readable and writeable by the webserver. SQLite requires access to both the file (for writing data) and the directory it resides in (for creating a lockfile).

The above is a complete and absolutely minimal wiki CGI script. To make it work as-is:

Set up the backend database

This example uses DBD::SQLite, so make sure you have that installed. Then run the following command (which should have come with your CGI::Wiki install) to initialise an SQLite database:

  cgi-wiki-setupdb --type sqlite --name /home/wiki/data/node.db

You should see notification of tables being created.

Make sure that the webserver will be able to write to the database file and to the directory it lives in.

Install the script and its templates

Put the script somewhere suitable so that your webserver will execute it.

Make a subdirectory of the directory the script is in, called templates. Copy the templates from the CGI::Wiki::Kwiki tarball into this directory. The webserver will need to read from here but it doesn't need to be able to write.

Set up a place for the searcher to index your wiki into

Make a subdirectory of the directory the script is in, called search_map. Make this writeable by the webserver.

You can have all kinds of other fun with it though; see EXAMPLES below. In particular, a nicer formatter to use is CGI::Wiki::Formatter::UseMod.

METHODS

new

Creates a new CGI::Wiki::Kwiki object. Expects some options, most have defaults, a few are required. Here's how you'd call the constructor - all values here (apart from formatters) are defaults; the values you must provide are marked.

    my $wiki = CGI::Wiki::Kwiki->new(
        db_type => 'MySQL',
        db_user => '',
        db_pass => '',
        db_name => undef,                     # required
        db_host => '',
        formatters => {
            documentation => 'CGI::Wiki::Formatter::Pod',
            tests         => 'My::Own::PlainText::Formatter',
            discussion    => [
                               'CGI::Wiki::Formatter::UseMod',
                               allowed_tags   => [ qw( p b i pre ) ],
                               extended_links => 1,
                               implicit_links => 0,
                             ],
            _DEFAULT      => [ # if upgrading from pre-0.4
                               'CGI::Wiki::Formatter::UseMod;
                             ],
                      },                  # example only, not default
        site_name => 'CGI::Wiki::Kwiki site',
        admin_email => 'email@invalid',
        template_path => './templates',
        stylesheet_url => "",
        home_node => 'HomePage',
        cgi_path => CGI::url(),
        search_map => './search_map',
        prefs_expire => '+1M',    # passed to CGI::Cookie; see its docs
        charset => 'iso-8859-1', # characterset for the wiki
    );

The db_type parameter refers to a CGI::Wiki::Store::[type] class. Valid values are 'MySQL', SQLite', etc: see the CGI::Wiki man page and any other CGI::Wiki::Store classes you have on your system. db_user and db_pass will be used to access this database.

formatters should be a reference to a hash listing all the formatters that you wish to support. Different wiki pages can be formatted with different formatters; this allows you to do things like have documentation pages written in POD, test suite pages written in plain text, and discussion pages written in your favourite Wiki syntax. If this hash has more than one entry, its keys will be supplied in a drop-down list on every edit screen, and the selected one will be used when displaying that page.

(If you do wish to supply more than one entry to the hash, you will need CGI::Wiki::Formatter::Multiple installed on your system.)

Each value of the formatters hash can be either a simple scalar giving the class of the required formatter, or an anonymous array whose first entry is the class name and whose other entries will be passed through to the formatter instantiation, parsed as a hash. (See the discussion formatter entry in the example code above if this sounds confusing.)

Note: Even if your formatters hash has only one entry, you should make its key be meaningful, since it will be stored in the node's metadata and will appear in dropdowns if you ever decide to support another kind of formatter.

Backwards Compatibility Note: If you are upgrading from a version of CGI::Wiki::Kwiki earlier than 0.4, and you have an existing wiki running on it, you should supply a _DEFAULT entry in the formatters hash so it knows what to do with nodes that have no formatter metadata stored.

This method tries to create the store, formatter and wiki objects, and will die() if it has a problem. It is the calling script's responsibility to catch any exceptions and tell the user.

run

Runs the wiki object, and outputs to STDOUT the result, including the CGI header. Takes no options.

    $wiki->run();

EXAMPLES

Just for fun, here is the configuration part of the wiki script Kake uses at work, full of horrid little hacks. Kake is thoroughly ashamed of herself but feels this is worth showing around in case anyone accidentally gets a useful idea from it.

  #!/usr/bin/perl -w
  use strict;
  use warnings;
  use CGI;
  use CGI::Wiki::Formatter::UseMod;
  use CGI::Wiki::Kwiki;
  use CGI::Wiki::Store::SQLite;
  use LWP::Simple;

  # Set up an array of allowed tags so we can make a macro to show them.
  my @allowed_tags = qw( a b p i em tt pre img div code br );

  # Set up the formatter conf here since we will be setting up an extra
  # formatter in order to make links with some of the macros.
  my %formatter_conf = (
                         extended_links => 1,
                         implicit_links => 0,
                         allowed_tags => \@allowed_tags,
                         node_prefix => "index.cgi?node=",
                         edit_prefix => "index.cgi?action=edit;node=",
                         # branding is important
                         munge_node_name => sub {
                             my $node_name = shift;
                             $node_name =~ s/State51/state51/g;
                             $node_name = "alex" if $node_name eq "Alex";
                             return $node_name;
                         },
                       );
  my $formatter = CGI::Wiki::Formatter::UseMod->new( %formatter_conf );
  # Create an extra wiki object too for passing to ->format when we call
  # it in the macros - so the formatter can find out which nodes already
  # exist.
  my $wiki = CGI::Wiki->new(
      store => CGI::Wiki::Store::SQLite->new(
                                          dbname => "./data/node.db"
                                            )
                           );

  my %macros = (
      # Perl Advent Calendar feed
      '@PERL_ADVENT_TODAY' => sub {
          my $xml = get( "http://perladvent.org/perladventone.rdf" )
            or return "[Can't get RSS for the Perl Advent Calendar!]";
          # Yes I know parsing XML with regexes is yuck, but this
          # is just a quick hack for December.
          if ( $xml =~ m|<item>\s*<title>([^<]+)</title>\s*<link>([^<]+)</link>| ) {
              return qq(<div align="center" style="border:dashed 1px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:5px;">Today's Perl Advent Calendar goodie is: [<a href="$2">$1</a>]</div>);
          } else {
              return "Can't parse Perl Advent Calendar RSS!";
          }
      },

      # Match state51::* modules and link to wiki page.
      qr/\b(state51::\w+(::\w+)*)\b/ => sub {
          my $module_name = shift;
          my $link = $formatter->format( "[[$module_name]]", $wiki );
          $link =~ s|<p>||;
          $link =~ s|</p>||;
          chomp $link; # or headings won't work
          return "<tt>$link</tt>";
      },

      # Match non-state51::* modules and link to search.cpan.org.
      # Don't match anything already inside an <a href ...
      # or preceded by a :, since that will be part of state51::*
      qr/(?<![>:])\b([A-Za-rt-z]\w*::\w+(::w+)*)\b/ => sub {
          my $module_name = shift;
          my $dist = $module_name;
          $dist =~ s/::/-/g;
          return qq(<a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/$dist"><tt><small>(CPAN)</small> $module_name</tt></a>);
      },

      # Print method names in <tt>
      qr/(->\w+)/ => sub { return "<tt>$_[0]</tt>" },

      # Macro to list available HTML tags.
      '@ALLOWED_HTML_TAGS' => join( ", ", @allowed_tags ),
  );

  my %config = (
      db_type => 'SQLite',
      db_name => './data/node.db',
      db_user => 'not_used',
      home_node => "Home",
      site_name => "state51 wiki",
      formatters => {
                      default => [
                                   'CGI::Wiki::Formatter::UseMod',
                                    %formatter_conf,
                                    macros => \%macros,
                                 ]
                    },
      template_path => "templates/",
      search_map => "./data/search_map/",
  );

The above is not intended to exemplify good programming practice.

TODO

Things I still need to do

Polish templates
Import script should catch case-sensitive dupes better
CGI::Wiki::Kwiki does not currently work under mod_perl. This is a serious problem. =back

SEE ALSO

AUTHORS

Tom Insam (tom@jerakeen.org) Kake Pugh (kake@earth.li)

CREDITS

Thanks to Kake for writing CGI::Wiki, and providing the initial patches to specify store and formatter types in the config. And for complaining at me till I released things. Thanks to Ivor Williams for diff support.

COPYRIGHT

     Copyright (C) 2003-2004 Tom Insam.  All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

1 POD Error

The following errors were encountered while parsing the POD:

Around line 313:

You forgot a '=back' before '=head1'