Dokuwiki Markdown

30-04-2021

Dokuwiki Markdown

Dokuwiki Markdown How To
Dokuwiki Markdown How To
Dokuwiki Markdown Plugin
Dokuwiki Markdown

DokuWiki, TiddlyWiki, and Zim are probably your best bets out of the 18 options considered. 'Free and open source' is the primary reason people pick DokuWiki over the competition. This page is powered by a knowledgeable community that helps you make an informed decision. Improve DokuWiki integration with Markdown defaulting This is a feature request. Specification Excepted to use other plugins in mdpage without with markdowndefault=1. Motivations Related issue: #71 I'm finding a way to let Markdown and DokuWiki's original syntax works together, like markdowku did. DokuWiki to Markdown Plugin. Download and Installation. DokuWiki to Markdown Plugin. Compatible with DokuWiki. 2020-07-29 'Hogfather' probably; 2018-04-22 'Greebo' probably; 2017-02-19 'Frusterick Manners' probably; 2016-06-26 'Elenor Of Tsort' yes; Download; Report bugs; Renders DokuWiki text into Markdown. Last updated on.

All I want in the world is a wiki that stores each page in a self-contained plain text file, uses standardised Markdown for basic formatting, and uses proper standardised wikilinks that autoupdate when a page name is modified. I don’t mind if it’s desktop app, or a web-based app that I can self-host locally. Unfortunately that whole package doesn’t currently exist.

There are wikis that kind of start to do what I want but not fully. The best I can do is Dokuwiki. It uses plain text files for page storage, but it’s format is not directly compatible with markdown so I can’t paste in markdown from other sources natively. I’ve used it for years. It is a really great wiki among many I have tried.

Feature wishlist

Plain text files – many wikis store the data in databases. This is not cool for futureproofing or avoiding vendor/software lock-in, even if they are open source.

What is cool is wiki files that are stored as .txt or .md files that you can open in any old text editor on any old computer if you decide to stop using that particular wiki in future, or if the wiki software development stops or is abandoned for example. Text files are also good for committing to git repos. That could also be useful in a work environment with multiple users.

Markdown – is a great format for notes. .md is the file extension. Unfortunately Dokuwiki uses its own formatting which is kind of like markdown but a bit different. There is a plugin but it’s not currently compatible.

Open source – free software with lots of eyeballs on the code, and likely more developers interested in maintaining and updating it. Less chance of vendor lock-in features.

Wiki links – are strong, direct connections to other pages. They are the whole point of a wiki to link knowledge and ideas. Contrast with Tags. Wiki links generally follow the common formats: wikiWord(where camelCase is recognised as a link), [[wiki link]], [[internal link|I'm the visible on page text]], [[https://www.google.com|I'm the visible on page text]]or [wiki link](https://www.google.com). Other editors that are wiki link aware should and generally are able to read these and follow clicked links if the text files are opened in them.

Links should auto update. If you change a page name, everywhere in the wiki that links to that page should get their links automatically updated to point to the new page name. This is not the case in the desktop wiki editors I have seen. The Zettelkasten style desktop ‘wiki’ editors rely on a wiki link being a unique ID, usually based on a timestamp [[20210301095523]] that doesn’t change. This is linked to a page of the same name that doesn’t change. This doesn’t seem to be user friendly, or flexible to me. Dokuwiki will update links if a page name changes, and page links are more user friendly.

#Tags – the ability to add tags and later search on those tags. Tags are a weak/loose linking system (in a good way), to generally link all pages that are of a similar theme or are loosely connected. Contrast with strong links where a page directly links to other pages with a wiki link. You should be able to initiate a search.

Dokuwiki will allow you to add tags, and later search on that tag, but they’re not clickable. Dokuwiki has a plugin for tags that might help with that.

Just add #hashtags to Dokuwiki and then you can search using hashtags. You might want to search with quotes around the full term “#myhashtag” to make it find the # symbol.

Backlinks (‘linked mentions’ in some software like Obsidian). A list of pages that link to the current page. Dokuwiki has a backlinks button on the right hand menu.

Export to PDF/ODT/DOCX – for sharing with other people. Dokuwiki as it’s web-based has print to PDF, and has export to other formats via plugins. Markdown (being standardised) on the other hand has a ton of export options using Pandoc.

Nice-to-haves

Some of these are more like features that come with desktop editors with wiki-like features, rather than web-based wikis. The useful thing if files are stored in .md text files is that another specialist editor can be used for more heavy lifting/complex editing, whist the wiki software can be used for basic editing.

Tools like Obsidian, Zettlr, or VSCode can be used for some of this type of work.

Drag n Drop and copy/paste images – It would be great to be able to include screenshots in pages easily.

Outlining your notes, using headings and indents, the tool should be able to jump lines up or down to reorder and indent. You can then start filling in notes.

Fold/collapse headings to allow you to easily work on editing the sections you want to work on.

Togglelists – taking a section and converting it to an ordered numbered or unordered list with keyboard shortcut

Hotkeys – to do all the moving around of lines etc. https://youtu.be/6Hn1_UMTgPo?t=659

Autosave – nobody likes to have to press save.

Citation/Reference handling – Zettlr has a great feature in that it integrates with Zotero. Obsidian can do the same. This makes it easy to grab references to research papers, website pages, PDFs etc. and then insert the citation and reference into pages. Whilst I’m no longer in academia, I have found this useful when using Zettlr. There’s a general discussion here on Zotero and integrations with other software.

Summary

For now I’ll continue to use Dokuwiki, and wait for the markdown plugin to get updated. I hope that will allow me to use markdown with Dokuwiki.

What is DokuWiki?

DokuWiki is a free and open-source wiki platform that you can self-host on Docker. It is super simple to use, you can edit pages using markdown or install a WYSIWYG editor. What makes DokuWiki unique when compared to other Wiki software is that it stores it’s information in markdown files on your server rather than relying on a separate database. Since it doesn’t require a separate database, DokuWiki is not only very simple to install, it is also quick and responsive. DockuWiki has plenty of templates and plugins available that are easy to install through the extension manager within the admin configuration page.

Before you run the following command to install DokuWiki on Docker, please make sure you have docker installed. If you are new to Docker, you can review the 25 Basic Docker Commands for Beginners to help get you started.

DokuWiki Docker Run Command