Revision [7517]

This is an old revision of InvisibleWiki made by DarTar on 2005-04-24 13:47:59.

 

Running an invisible wiki engine


Sites run by an invisible Wikka engine
 

How to install and configure an invisible wiki engine to power your website

One of the cons of using a WikiEngine wiki engine to power a website is that it will often look too "wikish" for your taste, with a lot of links and features that usually appear only on actual wikis. These include:


A common misunderstanding about wiki engines is that they can only be used to power actual wikis (or web-based collaborative projects like, for example, Wikipedia:Wikipedia). Wiki engines are, on the contrary, an extremely effective solution for managing different FlexibleWikka kinds of non-wiki websites, without bothering with FTP clients and servers.

I use WikkaWiki to run my personal website and I configured it so that all wiki-related features are hidden to the user in graphical browsers. No code modification is required, only the setting of specific options in the configuration file and some minor change in the WikkaCSS stylesheet.

The configuration

If you use Wikka to power a non-wiki site, here's what you need to do.

  1. First, you will need to restrict write access to the administrator (i.e., yourself), so as to prevent other users to modify the content of your site. Open wikka.config.php and set the ACL options as follows:
    "default_write_acl" => "!*",
    "default_read_acl" => "*",
    "default_comment_acl" => "!*",

These settings mean that by default anyone is able to read wiki pages but no one except the administrator can modify them.

  1. Second, hide comments by setting the relevant configuration option to '1':
    "hide_comments" => "1",

  1. Optionally, you might want to delete or mask all the default wiki-related pages, like - say - WikkaDocumentation or PageIndex. To do this, open the page and either:
    1. append /delete to the page URL to remove the page;
    1. append /acls (or click on Edit ACLs) to set the access options for this page as: !* - !* - !*;
  1. Reduce the navigation links to the minimum necessary links for instance:
    "navigation_links" => "[[UserSettings login]]",

  1. Modify the stylesheet to hide wiki-related page elements. In order to do so, open .css/wikka.css. First make of it, so you can restore the original stylesheet if you make any error. Then, look for all the components of the page that you want to be invisible to the user and mask them. This can be easily done by adding to the relevant CSS selector a display:none attribute. In my stylesheet, I mask the following elements:
.header h2 {display:none;}
.footer {display: none;}
.commentsheader {display: none;}
.comment {display: none;}
.commentinfo {display: none;}
.commentform {display: none;}
.smallprint {display: none;}
.exttail {display: none;}

An example of a similar CSS configuration can be found on the TestSkin skin selection page (void.css).
Keep in mind that the hidden elements are still visible in the page source so they will be crawled by search engines. To prevent this, change the ACL settings or remove these pages as suggested at point 3).


That's all folks. Comments and suggestions are welcome
-- DarTar
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