HyperionReactor The Middle Child of History

One of the best ways to manage large amounts of information and knowledge is using a WIKI. This is also a great way to work in groups and allow people to freely add and update content and information without a lot of effort.

Emacs is my favorite editor, and I would like to use when ever I have to play with text :) This lil tutorial will show you how you can use the editing power of Emacs and maintain a WIKI.

Emacs does have a bunch of WIKI modes, the issue with those modes are that they are static wiki pages, I do not think a WIKI is of any use if the pages are static and users are not allowed to modify and update information on it.

Starting off...

PMWiki is one of the best wikis I have use. PMWiki is easy to install and add extra features to. It also has a very nice SimpleTheme that you can use ( I use this one ).

h3. Setting up PMWiki

I am not going to get into much details here. If you need more information and details on the installation procedure, you can visit PMWiki's "installation instructions":http://pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/Installation

# Get the latest copy of PMWiki from "here":http://www.pmwiki.org/pub/pmwiki/pmwiki-latest.zip
# Unpack the archive in the directory you want. ( I created a directory called wiki/ and extracted it there, I also renamed pmwiki.php to index.php )
# Open pmwiki.php in a browser now example: http://mydomain.com/wiki/pmwiki.php or http://mydomain.com/wiki/index.php

Note: You may have to create the wiki.d directory in the directory where PMWiki lives. Also do not forget to give it a 777 permission.

h3. Setting up the configuration file.


$WikiTitle = "HyperionReactor";
$PageLogoUrl = "http://www.hyperionreactor.net/logo.gif";
$DefaultPasswords['admin'] = crypt('maximus');
$EnableUpload = 1;
$DefaultPasswords['upload'] = crypt('superman');


PMWiki will still work without these changes, but its nice to customize it a bit.

h3. Setting up Emacs

# You will need to download the package from CVS

# cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/pmwiki-mode login
[press enter when asked for a password]
# cd $HOME/.site-lisp/
# cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/pmwiki-mode checkout pmwiki-mode

# You now need to add this to your your .emacs file to load pmwiki-mode

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.site-lisp/pmwiki-mode")
(require 'pmwiki-mode)


# Some quick customizations to integrate your wiki with emacs

(set 'pmwiki-author "wnorrix")
(set 'pmwiki-default-uri "http://www.mydomain.com/wiki/index.php/Main/HomePage")
(set 'pmwiki-default-site "http://www.mydomain.com/wiki")
(set 'pmwiki-open-uri-default pmwiki-default-uri)


To use pmwiki-mode just do a M-x pmwiki-open

I am currently testing out Emacs and PHPWiki integration, if all goes well, I will blog about it in a week or so.

Technorati Tags: Emacs, Wiki, PmWiki