DokuWiki blogging

I've used DokuWiki as a base for a few PHP projects since it provides access control navigation and other such niceties, combined with a very capable Wiki CMS for publishing static content.

Adding your code to it can be as simple as editing a page and entering:

[php]
include("myPhpCode.inc.php");
[/php]

(where I've subsitituted square brackets for the usual angle brackets - since blogger.com seems not to like the latter)

There are a some complications around dealing with when the headers are sent vs when the contents of the page is generated, and around when the session is written back - but nothing insurmountable.

So when my boss tasked me to come up with a simple CMS solution which could provide RSS and atom feeds, needed authentication for adding content, and needed to have "lists of things" using a blog within DokuWiki seemed like an obvious solution.

Dokuwiki has a plugin 'blogtng' intended to replace the older 'blog' plugin. Both use files for holding the content which was not ideal (I expect that we'll be adding a lot of stuff in there, and require the ability to edit/remove old stuff, also actively pruning old data might be required too for performance/storage reasons). However blogtng uses a database for indexing the content. Great, I thought.

And then I discover that the PHP from RHEL5 is compiled without sqlite support. That's odd - but I'm not disheartened - I go find out local software guardian and ask for the installation media. There then follows much running around in the manner of the Keystone Cops - indeed if this were a movie rather than a blog it would undoubtedly be shown speeded up, and accompanied by Yakkety Sax - a la Benny Hill. Still no CD-ROM, however as far as I can tell, RedHat never implemented the sqlite extension. There are some third party implementations for RHEL :) except for version 5 :(

So then I try to rewrite blogtng using mysql. Which proves to be messy. Although it appears to have been written with the notion of some abstraction from the underlying database, direct calls to the extension occur throughout the code. So I first rewrote all these into the abstractin layer. Next, I doscover that sqlite seems to be completely untyped, so I have to reverse engineer the possible datatypes and update all the DDL scripts. Then I find that all the DML needs to be changed too. I also find that it seems to be creating blog entries whenver I view a page (even before I've added the page markup to create any blogs).

The RHEL5 does support the PDO extension with the sqlite driver, and now that all the database connection code is in one place, it was fairly easy to port it back to that and restore the original DDL and DML. It seems I can now create blogs, blog entries and comments, but still getting blog entries created randomly - so I go back and check the repository - its a known bug. Grrrr.