Private Wiki

I'm discovering how really incredible git is for a wiki back-end. Fact is, revisions are great for backups and historical review, but they aren't used nearly as often as the most current version, and if they aren't stored efficiently they can eat up a ton of space before you know it.

I use ikiwiki for public wikis and some general publishing. Its cool because it can use a variety of back-ends: git, subversion, among others, but surprisingly it doesn't even need a reversion control system. Neither does Nesta, but that's primarily for blogs. I only mention it in this post because its written in Ruby and uses Sinatra.

Which brings me to Git Wiki, the wiki I'm most familiar with besides Private Wiki. I don't use it publicly, because it has no built-in access controls, but thanks to EncFS and git, I have experimented with an encrypted storage systems.

The Private Wiki codebase will now be managed with Git, on Github.com for public access:

http://github.com/docunext/private-wiki

Just a quick review of some Private Wiki developments:

• XHTML Output
• Dynamic DOM javascript code output
• Cleaned up code

Does this mean that a release is in the works? Yes, definitely. Its been almost a year since the last release!

Markdown is a terrific syntax and I've added a plugin for it to Private Wiki. There are many great parsers which can transform markdown to html, but most of them (all?) lack the syntax for wiki links.I'm planning to add simple double bracket wiki link capabilities, and that way Private Wiki will be a lot more flexible and compatible with other programs. Thoughts?

I need to switch to using the latest version of Private Wiki in our everyday operations. I'm still using a version which is several years old.

When I made the program open source (AGPLv3), I needed to make a bunch of changes to the code base. If I recall to the last time I did a bunch of development on Private Wiki, all those changes are complete. All that's required now for me to use it everyday is installation, configuration, and testing.

I haven't had any time over the past several months to work on programming, but my schedule has cleared up quite a bit, so I'm going make this a big priority. Hopefully before the end of December!

I've noticed a bit more traffic to the Private Wiki website lately, so I'm posting this quite note to update visitors on the status of the Private Wiki project: it's alive and well!

Also a quick reminder that Nexista is a required library for Private Wiki, as it provides the "glue" to bring all the XML resources together. PEAR is also required for the Text_Wiki parser.

In closing, I'm planning to setup some more resources for this project soon, including some mailing lists for users and interested developers.