DokuWiki of the Month: Terrestrial Orchid Wiki
This article is part of a monthly series.
Every month I present a DokuWiki powered site which is special for its design, content or clever use of the software. To give you a first impression on what the site is about I'll send a short, interview style questionnaire to its creator.
Terrestrial Orchid Wiki
This month's wiki is the Terrestrial Orchid Wiki. An encyclopedic site about a special type of orchids.
I picked this site for its deep and professional content and the beautiful images.
Questions were answered by Frederick Depuydt who is the maintainer of the site.
Can you give a short introduction on what your wiki is about?
The wiki is intended to collect data on the culture and care of terrestrial orchids. Everyone knows orchids as tropical plants with roots popping out of pots. Terrestrial orchid culture is pretty new to the Western world, and we try to collect as much experience as possible from a humongous amount of fragmented data.
Since when is it online?
Terrorchid exists since 4 years ago, the wiki was installed in February 2007 but the layout and content has been added only a few months ago.
Why did you choose DokuWiki? Did you try other software before?
- PHP without MySQL. Database support is a very nice add-on for server-software, but not for a wiki. I don't have access to SQLadmin everywhere, but I want to be able to change wiki content/layout everywhere.
- ease of installation, maintenance and a very big community support with plugins. From a developer's point of view I've been able to personalize the plugin code without help from outside.
- easy syntax
- It's free. Big bonus, as I want to offer content without a pixel of advertising.
Did you do any modifications to the software?
The main code is not changed, but I did write a plugin that accesses external databases from Kew and IPNI. I'm currently working on a plugin that lists photos from my Coppermine gallery according to the orchid genus that is requested.
I also wrote software where people can add a link via the database-plugin, which is then nicely formatted into a list of links.
Who is editing the site?
Open group, only the main page is closed for editing. Added data is easily checked since we have a forum.
Brag about your statistics ;-)
The wiki is still in its infancy, but I do get massive amount of attention for pages that are illustrated with photos and flash animation, e.g. on the page about Pseudo Copulation.
Is there anything else you want to tell about your wiki?
A friend of mine and myself do web-design from time to time. My wiki-installation was also a test-case for this: DokuWiki has been embraced by bloggers, I think the next step is to offer a blank canvas where content/layout can be easily modified. Making CSS and PHP accessible via a mediamanager should do the job.
If you know of a DokuWiki driven site which is somehow remarkable and should be featured as DokuWiki of the Month, drop me a mail or leave a comment, please.