SimpleWiki is a component that allows you to add a wiki-style section to your BIF based website. If you don't know what a wiki is, I recommend you reading this explanation (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki), you won't regret it as wiki are a wonderful tool to create collaborative websites.

The short explanation is: SimpleWiki enable your users to collaborate with contents on any section of your website, by showing them a simple editing and viewing interface on the same web browser.

You have to do almost the same task for every component you add to your BIF website, first you should define an instance of the SimpleWiki class on the mapping.txt file, like this:

wiki:SimpleWiki(wiki/;IndexPage;600;172800)

As you should know, the first word, wiki, is the SimpleWiki instance's name, the constructor takes 4 arguments: first the path to the content directory, this directory should have the right permissions to let the webserver write the necessary files. Second, the name of the index wiki page and it should be in WikiWord format, it defaults to 'IndexPage'. Third, the page locking timeout in seconds; it's used to protect a wiki page and prevent a user to edit it while other user is editing it too. Last argument, the time a wiki page modification is considered to be new, in seconds too.

Once you save the mapping.txt file with the new entry, you should add the instance to some part of your website, this can be done by editing a .bif file like this:

<bifroot>
  <bifinclude src="component://wiki" />
</bifroot>

Then, you can include and render this file using some PHP code like this one:

<?php
  include_once('bifConfig.inc');
  $root =& render_file('wiki.bif');
  echo $root->draw();
?>

That should do the trick. SimpleWiki will create a default index wiki page so you can start working with it.

SimpleWiki needs RCS to be installed on your system so it can make versions of any changes you make to your wiki pages. RCS should be installed by default on most GNU/Linux distributions, so I suppose this is not a problem, but I think is important to make this note.

The user interface of SimpleWiki is very... simple :)... if you know how to use a wiki. If you don't know, please refer to the link on the top of this tutorial.

Basically, the UI is divided in 3 parts, the upper part is the action bar, the middle part is the content space and the lower part is the status bar. On the top the component shows different actions depending on the mode the wiki is: content view, content edition, pages list or diff view.

The content view mode is the normal reading mode of SimpleWiki, the content of the actual wiki page is showed after being properly rendered by the component. Here you can click on WikiWords that will lead you to other wiki pages. Also you can edit the page to add or modify content at will. The "Site Map" link will show a list of all the existing wiki pages, with the newer ones listed on top so you can check if there was new modifications easily. The "View Diffs" link will show you all the modifications that the actual wiki page had suffered, you can you this mode to revert the state of the wiki page to some previous version, if you feel that someone made a mistake or delete something useful.

The content editing mode is the way the user has to modify or add new content to the wiki page. When you enter on this mode, the wiki page is locked by the componente, generating a locking code that only you have, so no one can edit that wiki page until you release the lock or the lock timeout expires. SimpleWiki uses a basic (subset) syntax based on TWiki's syntax, so you can learn how to use it reading from TWiki's website.

How do you create new wiki pages? You have two ways, one by writing it on an existing wiki web, so that the component will give you the option to create it by showing a question mark (?) next to the WikiWord. After you put some content on that new wiki page, the WikiWord will show itself as a link. The second way to create a new wiki page is to write the WikiWord on the "Go:" text field, si that the component will give you the opportunity to create it.

SimpleWiki is not meant to be a complete wiki implementation, it doesn't have user authentication, nor page templates, etc...so you will have to live with that or write a ComplexWiki component yourself ;-). Nevertheless it has the essential features to make it useful, and it's so easy to add to your existing BIF site that I think you should at least test it a little.

This component was built to show the developers that with components, BIF provides an excellent platform to develop mini applications that can be embedded in a few minutes to your site without effort. It is important to note also that the first working implementation of this component took me about 16 hours of coding...I think that's pretty fast! ;-).

If you have any comments you can contact me via email(lucas_at_lunix.com.ar).