Update: 12/02/05 I discovered a broken link (to the Wikka Wiki site) in this post, which is now repaired.
I appreciate the comments I got today from two of the Wikka Wiki developers, Nils Lindenberg and Marjolein Katsma. They responded to my April 26 post about some problems I had working with the Wikka Wiki software. They were naturally curious about my comment that working with the program hadn’t been easy, and they offered some suggestions to help me work out some of the problems I encountered.
I need to say a little bit more about this. First of all, a direct response to my blog post with an offer of support is very encouraging, and reassures me that I made a good choice to install this package. It was dead simple to install. The problem that I had with the comment form not displaying was resolved once I got home and away from the school district’s demonic filter. I found the answer to the problem with the comment form on the FAQ under (what else?) Comments:
* When I click on the [Add comment] link, wikka asks me, if I want to create this page instead of showing the comments-form
o Look into your wikka.config.php and set the entry ‘rewrite_mode’ => ’1′, to ’0′. That should solve the problem .
That did fix the comment form situation, but I still can’t get the friendly URLs I was looking for. They all say “wikka.php?wakka=” before the page name. I wanted to get rid of that, which is why I had the rewrite_mode variable set to 1. I don’t understand enough about Apache and .htaccess to know what I’m doing – not that it stops me from trying – but it’s hit or miss. Miss in my case. And I don’t understand enough about what I’m dong to know how to refine my troubleshooting procedure. The best I could do was to put a .htaccess file in there that DIDN’T do anything. The worst was when I just got error pages.
I tried the workaround today, as suggested. And I got a page that had no CSS formatting, along with the same funky URLs that I was trying to avoid. My solution now is to redefine the problem as not significant and move on. Retreat, when you are fighting a losing battle, and prepare for a counterattack another day.
I really like the Wikka Wiki software. It is easy to work with and I’ve been having fun putting my teacher research project pages together. I got an email message from my UAF professor pal, Joan, tonight. She was supposed to be working on this wiki with me. I wanted to get her familiar with wiki collaboration so I suggested we do this research project on the wiki. The message that I got from her was basically an SOS. She got stuck at the login page. Nothing was wrong. She just didn’t know what to do. She saw the form and freaked out. I went back and put more detailed instructions on the front page of the wiki, and emailed her letting her know that she should try again. It is difficult to know where people are going to stumble when you put something together. I have it set up to require a login to write, but not to read or comment. I don’t think that is a mistake because I don’t really want this to be a huge wiki. I didn’t mean to intimidate people though. I’m glad she is doing this with me because she will help me smooth the rough edges. I’ve signed up for so many accounts on the internet now that to me it’s nothing. But I have to remember that isn’t the case with everyone.
More difficulty this evening came when I had the great idea to include an RSS feed from my student bloggers onto the wiki site. It should have worked like a charm. But it doesn’t. And I don’t know why. I believe it has something to do with the server that the blog is on, but I can read the xml document that gets generated, so I’m not sure. But what I do know is that every other site’s feed that I pasted into the wiki displayed the feed quite nicely. My students’ blog page, though, had an error message at the top of the page. The message said that there was an
error on line 130 in …wiki/3rdparty/plugins/onyx-rss/onyx-rss.php: The specified file could not be opened.
I spent a long time trying to understand this. I can’t. I feel like I wasted another evening banging into a wall that I can’t even see. As I said, I can use any other feed and get it to display beautifully.
This rss experiment wasn’t a complete bust. It was actually part one of a plan I came up with to write content on northernattitude for the Alaska wiki that I would feed to the wikicity. I need to look at the templates system they have set up there. I saw some documentation on it the other day and I’m going to explore that a little more soon. I know now how to write an rss action for Wikka Wiki. I just don’t know why it wouldn’t work with my students’ blogs…
More on the school district’s paranoid security policies soon…
