DokuWiki of the Month: LOLCODE
This article is part of a monthly series.
Every month I present a DokuWiki powered site which is special for its design, content or clever use of the software. To give you a first impression on what the site is about I'll send a short, interview style questionnaire to its creator.
LOLCODE
This month's wiki is remarkable for being funny and serious at the same time. Surely not your ordinary programming language wiki 
.
Questions were answered by LOLCODE's inventor and site maintainer Adam T. Lindsay.
Can you give a short introduction on what your wiki is about?
The LOLCODE wiki provides the central hub for all things LOLCODE. LOLCODE is a humorous esoteric programming language, conceived around the language spoken by LOLCats. Since its launch, LOLCODE had gotten attention from all sorts of geeks and enthusiasts world-wide, and has attracted a truly humbling range of real implementations.
The canonical example is:
HAI CAN HAS STDIO? VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!" KTHXBYE
If that appeals to you in anyway, you'd likely enjoy the site. If you have no clue what that might mean, then it can be safely ignored.
Since when is it online?
I launched at the end of May 2007, using DokuWiki alone. The week following the launch was full of sleepless nights, just buzzing on the volume of attention the site was getting. In fairly short order, I added a much-requested forum site and integrated the blog plugin to the front page.
Why did you chose DokuWiki? Did you try other software before?
I knew from the start that I wanted a site driven by community contributions: LOLCODE in its original form simply consisted of three, very short, joke program listings that I wanted to share with the world. I knew from the start I wouldn't have the time or energy to oversee all of the details in the language, but wanted to be able to control abuse.
I had a lot of experience with MediaWiki, not all of it pleasant. I had recently noticed DokuWiki, and its ease of use, flexibility, and fine-grained security control really appealed to me. In actual deployment, it far exceeded my expectations: I have had next to no abuse to deal with, and it has been very adaptable to its main front page function as a blog.
Did you do any modifications to the software?
I didn't have to do anything to the core software itself.
I certainly prefer a different URL structure from the default provided, but it was trivially easy to configure it to my preferred layout.
As for other customizations, I only modified an off-the-shelf theme for a custom site banner and some simple ads. The rest was accomplished with common, well-respected plugins, including badbehaviour, blog, include and indexmenu.
Who is editing the site?
While I have sole control of the main namespace, other namespaces are wide open to contributions by any registered user (and anyone can register). The fine-grained access control is certainly one of the killer features of DokuWiki from my point of view.
I deal with more spam in a day on the LOLCODE forums than I have ever had to deal with on the DokuWiki section of the site.
Brag about your statistics ;-)
When LOLCODE launched and quickly made the front pages of Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, BoingBoing and StumbleUpon, we served over a million pages in less than a week. The site still gets thousands of new visitors a week from people who still haven't seen the joke.
Beyond the numbers, however, is the attention LOLCODE has gotten from around the world, some from personal heroes of mine. It's opened some interesting doors as well, most recently with an invitation to ROFLCon.
Is there anything else you want to tell about your wiki?
Nothing else to tell: I just want to say thanks for providing such a great piece of software to the community. DokuWiki has been a pleasure to work with as the hub of all things LOLCODE.
If you know of a DokuWiki driven site which is somehow remarkable and should be featured as DokuWiki of the Month, drop me a mail or leave a comment, please.