More DokuWiki plugins
DokuWiki can easily be extended through plugins. And because DokuWiki is an excellent framework in it self, doing so is really really simple.
Besides the pirate plugin I mentioned in my latest blog post, I worked on three other plugins in the last weeks. A quick description of what they do follows.
Oh and remember to use the popularity plugin from time to time to give feedback which plugins you use.
Amazon Plugin
The Amazon plugin isn't a new plugin. In fact it is one of the oldest available. I released a first version of it back in 2005. Since then I never updated it and though it still worked, it was missing a bit of polishing.
This syntax plugin allows you to easily embed some book info into your page by just feeding it the ISBN of the book. Or use Amazon's ASIN id to reference Video Games, Music CDs, DVDs or anything else sold at Amazon. The plugin will fetch data like title, author, publisher and the book cover via Amazon's API.
The new updated plugin now correctly deals with UTF-8 encoded data, can handle books with multiple authors, works with ISBN-13 numbers and can optionally display the cheapest price at Amazon. It supports the Amazon stores of Germany, France, Canada, Britain, Japan and the US. If you have a Amazon associate ID you can configure it in the config manager.
Bureaucracy Plugin
Some people (like me) use DokuWiki as a lightweight content management system for their website. A common task is to provide a form to make it easier for users to send feedback or to order additional information.
So far there where only two plugins providing a way to embed a form into a DokuWiki page. One is the contact plugin which is rather limited. The other is the form plugin which has a somewhat cumbersome syntax and some really crude code constructs. But I liked the idea to be able to define your form in wiki syntax.
So I started my own form plugin called Bureaucracy. It allows you to define a form with as many fields you like, while trying to keep the syntax as simple as possible. The plugin will take care of the form validation and sends the entered data to the designated email address.
Future versions may also have the ability to send data to a given URL, create a wiki page or store it in a SQLite database. Let me know what you would want.
SwiftMail Plugin
A reoccurring problem people seem to have with DokuWiki is that sending mails fails. We even have a FAQ page for it. The culprit is not having PHP configured correctly for sending mails. This is mostly a problem when running PHP on Windows.
The SwiftMailer library works around this by implementing its own SMTP mailer which can talk to a remote mail server without the need for a locally installed MTA.
The SwiftMail plugin integrates SwiftMailer into DokuWiki. Users can simply configure their ISP's mailserver (with optional SSL support and SMTP authentication) in the configuration manager. This should make running DokuWiki on Windows systems quite a bit easier.
