This Wiki is running the CVS version of WackoWiki Release 4 as at 16.06.2004 17:59 with some local enhancements and a specially developed BCS stylesheet.
User Registration
Anyone can register using the Registration page and start using this Wiki immediately.
You will be sent an email. You should act on its instructions to confirm your email address which will then allow you to use the password recovery feature.
You can use the Settings page to change various options.
A link to a new page called YourName will be created. I recommend that you create that page with as much or as little personal information as you wish, and set the ACL to prevent others changing it. If you don't create the page, anyone else could.
Tracking Changes
Registered users can click on the “watch this page” icon in a page footer to request email notification when that page changes.
Quick Links
Use the in the top navigation bar to add your favourite pages to the list of links.
Creating pages
A page link is created implicitly when you enter a Wiki Name (you type WikiName: the formatting may have inserted spaces between words) in a page which you are editing or a comment that you are adding.
If the page identified by the Wiki Name already exists, you will get a link to it.
If this is a new Wiki Name, when the page is displayed, the Wiki Name will have a dashed underline and be followed by a ?
Click on the ? to create the new page.
You can delete pages that you own and comments that you have created.
Deletion is not undoable
Editing pages
Click on the “Edit this page” link – which is only visible if you are allowed to edit the page.
Depending on your browser and the option in your Settings, you can also double-click on a page to edit it.
If you are using a recent version of Netscape, any of several Mozilla/Gecko-based browsers, or Internet Explorer you will see a Javascript toolbar to with buttons to help enter the formatting tags. Unfortunately, other browsers, including Opera and the KDE Konqueror browser, cannot be supported because of limitations in their support for the Document Object Model.
Page Actions
This wiki implementation supports several “page actions” which you can put on pages that you create or edit.
Some of the most useful are:
Action code in page source
Result
{{ToC}}
Table of Contents
{{MyPages}}
List of pages you own
{{MyWatchesPages}}
List of pages you are watching
{{backlinks}}
List of pages linking to current page – useful for navigation
If you are the owner of a page, you'll be able to click on the Settings link in the footer and view the ACLs.
By default, on this Wiki,
ACLs for Read and Comment access are set to * allowing any access to user, whether registered or not
The Write ACL defaults to $ which means that only logged-on, registered users may change the page.
If you set an ACL to blank, no-one, except you as owner, will have access.
! means “not”, so !* also means nobody has access.
You can change any of the ACLs to permit selected users access, or you can assign to a group of users by entering the group name, if you know that a group has been set up.
In this implementation, groups can only be created and updated manually by an admin user.
Moderation
There is no formal moderator role in most Wikis.
Wikis tend to rely on users to act responsibly when editing pages to which multiple users collaborate.
You can always use the revisions link at the bottom of a page to see what has been added or deleted, when and by whom.
Page owners, and admins, can delete pages.
File Uploading
Was broken in the Beta code at WackoWiki, is now fixed.
You do need explicit authorisation to upload files. Members of the various groups for whom this wiki is intended should find that they have permission to upload files. Anyone else should contact me ( OxonAdmin) if you want to ask for upload permission.
WakkaWiki is/was a promising lightweight implementation of a Wiki running on PHP and MySQL.
Development on WakkaWiki seems to have stopped, but several forks of the code have been spun off and are being enhanced.
WackoWiki seems closest to the original WakkaWiki and its Russian developers have added several useful enhancements.
Why WackoWiki
For the documentation projects which are the major reason for setting up this Wiki, its lightweight implementation, simple Access Control mechanism, small codebase and clean user interface seemed attractive.
In particular, the ability to “watch” pages (receive email notification of changes) should be useful to team members.
WackoWiki status update
As at 27 May 2004, the WackoWiki site was down, but I was able to find archives of its pages on the WebArchive. In case it goes offline again, I have mirrored some of the documentation in this wiki at Wacko Documentation? and Wacko Formatting.
WackoWiki needs PHP Release 4.1
Few of the wiki implementations I evaluated would run on PHP 4.0.6, the level that was available on the Member Group Hosting Service.
Luckily we had access to alternative hosting space on a more uptodate software base. AdrianWalmsley /14.07.2004 16:57/ As of this morning, the Member Group Hosting Server has been upgraded to PHP 4.3.7, so I can now plan to migrate this wiki across. The move to a different host needs to be planned carefully, so it won't happen overnight, and I will take the opportunity to upgrade the software to WackoWiki R4 Release Candiate 1. I'll give advance notice here and arrange for URLs to be forwarded.
Other Wiki implementations considered
Our hosting options meant that I was looking for an open source (or at least free) implementation running on some combination of PHP, Perl and MySQL.
After quite a search, using http://www.opensourcecms.com/ and http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines my short list came down to
Tiki was very full featured but overspecified for my purpose.
In the end I preferred the simplicity of the appearance and interface of WakkaWiki. But as WakkaWiki development seems to have stopped, I went for a fork of Wakka called WackoWiki
Limitations of this Beta
There were a few bugs of varying severity when I started looking at this Wiki. However, thanks to the small codebase, it has been fairly easy to scan through the code and fix most of the problems.
The option to preview an edited page before saving it was not working in the beta code as downloaded from WackoWiki, but this too has been fixed.
The bug – first noticed by Brian Day – affecting watched pages is fixed in the latest code drop installed today (AdrianWalmsley /16.06.2004 17:59/). Previously, if the page you were watching had restricted access, even though you yourself were allowed to view the page, notifications were not being sent when it changed.
The latest code drop exposes a bug in Netscape 7.1, Mozilla Firefox 0.8, and other browsers based on the Mozilla engine (for example Gnome). When previewing a page with affected browsers, you may notice some interword spaces are missing. The final stored viersion of the page does display correctly. Other browsers, including IE, Opera 7.5, Konqueror and Firefox 0.9 do not have this problem.
BcsOxonWiki: AboutThisWiki ...
CVS version
in a page footer to request email notification when that page changes.
in the top navigation bar to add your favourite pages to the list of links.