Design Optimization

A Wiki Administrator can make a lot of customizations simply by setting variables in the /local/config.php and defining cascading style sheets in /pub/css/local.css files. Any group or page can also have its own configuration file and configuration css file.

This page describes how customizations work in general, see PmWiki.Documentation Index for specific customizations that are commonly performed at many PmWiki installations, including:

• Skins - Change the look and feel of part or all of PmWiki
• Internationalizations - Language internationalisation of web pages
• Custom Markup - Using the Markup() function for custom wiki syntax
• InterMaps - Interwiki links definition and use

local/config.php

From its inception, PmWiki has been designed so that Wiki Administrators can greatly customize the way PmWiki displays pages and the markup sequences used to generate pages. (This is even mentioned explicitly in PmWiki Philosophy #4 Collaborative Maintenance.) As a result, the core pmwiki.php script makes extensive use of PmWiki.Variables to determine how markup sequences will be processed and what each individual page will output.

The simplest type of customization is merely setting a variable to 1 (or TRUE). Here's an example that enables ?action=diag and ?action=phpinfo actions:

You can begin a line with a "#" (an octothorpe, a.k.a. a hash symbol or pound sign) to add a comment. Additionally, some built-in PmWiki variables take values other than 1 or 0 (true or false). Here's another example that customizes the wiki's behavior with respect to search engine web robots (see Cookbook:ControllingWebRobots):

# Remove the default "rel='nofollow'" attribute for external links.
$UrlLinkFmt = "<a class='urllink' href='\$LinkUrl' title='\$LinkAlt'>\$LinkText</a>";

The scripts/ subdirectory (below the directory holding the pmwiki.php script) has many customizations. The PmWiki Cookbook contains many example customizations (recipes) that you can download into the cookbook/ subdirectory, The first few lines of each of these scripts generally contain instructions about how to enable (and use) the feature provided by the script.

These customizations are included in your config.php site configuration. For most scripts this is done by simply adding lines like:

and

at the end of the config.php file to enable them.

Some of the scripts are automatically enabled for you via the scripts/stdconfig.php script unless you disable it by setting $EnableStdConfig=0; in local/config.php.

Order of the commands in config.php (link)

The following order is recommended:

• define $ScriptUrl and $PubDirUrl, if needed,
• define any custom PageStore class, like SQLite, CompressedPageStore or PerGroupSubDirectories,
• next include_once scripts/xlpage-utf-8.php,
• next call XLPage() which needs the definitive (rw) $WikiDir already set in order to find the wiki page containing the translations,
• next include authuser.php (if needed), because PmWiki caches some group and page authorization levels when a page is accessed,
• next include any other scripts and recipes,
• any direct function call in config.php, like ResolvePageName(), CondAuth(), PageTextVar(), PageVar(), RetrieveAuthPage(), or others, if possible, should be done near the end of config.php.

Note, each part is not required, but if your wiki needs it, this is the recommended order in config.php.

Character encoding of config.php

The encoding used when you save config.php has an effect. Your text editor should allow you to save config.php in the encoding of your wiki. (The default encoding of PmWiki is ISO-8859-1, for new wikis it is recommended to enable UTF-8.)

Newer operating systems like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Apple generally default to saving text files in Unicode/UTF-8; in Windows the default encoding is ANSI/Windows-1252 which is almost the same as PmWiki's ISO-8859-1.

The following free/libre software text editors can edit and save a file in different encodings:

• Cross-platform: Kate (for KDE), Geany, Arachnophilia, SciTE, Bluefish, vim and others.
• Windows: Notepad++, ConTEXT, Notepad 2.
• OS X: Aquamacs.

Note that if you use the UTF-8 encoding, you should save your files "without Byte Order Mask (BOM)".

Over time PmWiki will be updated to default to Unicode/UTF-8 encoding, which allows all possible alphabets and languages. See UTF-8 for more information.

pub/css/local.css

You can create this file and set there some custom CSS styles which will override any styles set by skins. For example:

  h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 { color: #880000; } /*dark red titles*/
  a { text-decoration: none; } /* don't underline links */

Don't modify pmwiki.php or other core files

You should strongly resist the temptation to directly modify the pmwiki.php script or the files in the scripts/ subdirectory. Any modifications you make to these files will probably be overwritten whenever you upgrade. Instead, look at some of the sample scripts for examples of customizations that can be performed from config.php. You can even create your own script to do a customization and use include_once(...) to include it from config.php. If you do make your own customization script, you can safely put it in the cookbook/ subdirectory--it won't get overwritten by an upgrade there. You might also want to submit your customization to the pmwiki-users mailing list or the Cookbook so that others can benefit from your effort and so that it can perhaps be included in future releases of PmWiki.

FAQ

## Get the group and page name
$pagename = ResolvePageName($pagename);
$page = PageVar($pagename, '$FullName');
$group = PageVar($pagename, '$Group');
$name = PageVar($pagename, '$Name');