How shall I install PmWiki into our web application’s directory structure? I have source code, third-party library, and (user generated) data sub-directories. A wiki spans all three: it should be installed in the library area, the generated wiki pages should go into data, and pages that are to be kept long-term must be backed up. I don’t want a separate backup procedure, thus I wish to place the wiki content under Subversion source code control.

Wiki packages seem to prefer their default directory scheme, so I decided against trying to force PmWiki into my structure and instead will create a new top-level directory just for it. The plan is that only this pmwiki directory and the wiki.d and local sub-directories will be under subversion control. All other files and directories will be unversioned.

Initial installation of the PmWiki software:

1. mkdir -p pmwiki/{wiki.d,local}
2. svn add pmwiki
3. ln -s pmwiki{,-2.1.27} # symbolic link so that the versioned tar file is extracted into the controlled directory.
4. tar -xzf pmwiki.tgz
5. rm pmwiki-2.1.27
6. Edit local/config.php
7. Add the “rename” action to cookbook area, config.php (and optionally to Site/ EditForm).
8. Modify the logo and skins/themes.

Both developers and eventually end-users will be editing Help and Manual pages using the Wiki interface. This editing may occur on the development web server or the public system. I want to capture “approved” changes into subversion, which I believe can be done by committing the wiki.d directory periodically.

Once end-users start editing the public site, developers must either: a) make our edits on the public site also, or b) update our development server to match the public site, make our edits, commit the update, and re-publish to the public site. Option b must be done quickly or by disabling editing on the public site during the update.

Suppose we arrive at a point where there are numerous desired updates made by the user community, a few vandalized pages, plus other edits which we don’t want to adopt into the official documentation. Here’s a procedure:

1. Clone the public site’s wiki.d onto the development server.
2. On the development machine, restore or svn revert the vandalized pages.
3. Restore, modify, or svn revert the updates we wish to discard.
4. svn commit the wiki.d directory.
5. Check-out and publish the updated configuration to the public site.