DokuWiki of the Month: The Shire
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.
The Shire
This month's wiki is used – as DokuWiki was originally intended – for software documentation.
Questions were answered by the site's webmaster Galen Johnson.
Can you give a short introduction on what your wiki is about?
I'm using Dokuwiki with the Sandy template to to act as a repository for Hobbit monitors and other scripts…sort of like Deadcat for Big Brother. It's also used to keep track of some faq info and eventually a proper wiki for Hobbit usage (there is another available and I didn't really want to duplicate that effort).
Since when is it online?
It's been online for about a year and a half (late 2006).
Why did you choose DokuWiki? Did you try other software before?
I tried others (Mediawiki, Twiki, MoinMoin, etc) but liked the ease of Dokuwiki better. I chose to use Dokuwiki for its simplicity of deployment, the fact that the content is stored in files on the server instead of within a database (if something happens, I can at least get at the content) as well as its ease of extensibility via a fairly well defined plugin API and user access controls.
We had actually tried it out where I work and I liked the ease of maintenance… And I use it for some general documentation I need to share with others.
Did you do any modifications to the software?
I have not yet modified the software here (I actually provided an SVG plugin a couple of years ago) but do have plans to create a plugin I can use to more easily populate the summaries pages based on the header of the actual monitors. Unfortunately, time is a luxury that is in very short supply.
Who is editing the site?
Right now it's closed. I'm currently editing the site (I've provided potential contributors a template) but I am planning to open it up more to the Hobbit community in general… starting with the script developers. If only it had a “page template” feature…I thought I had seen one in the works a while back but haven't checked lately1).
Brag about your statistics ;-)
There's really not a whole lot to brag about. My awstats was disabled a while ago and I have no hard and fast numbers…but people notice when it's down and I hear about it on the hobbit list (usually comments along the lines of I should probably monitor it with Hobbit 
)
Is there anything else you want to tell about your wiki?
Not a whole lot more to tell. This is a great application that has proven itself flexible enough to be more than just a wiki.
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.