Modifications we have made to PhpWiki

Currently the wlug wiki runs on a CVS version of the PhpWiki from early 2002 (sometime around March). There are a lot of hidden things that the wlug wiki does that we've added and probably need to support with anything we move to:

• Excellent support for search engines including:

  • rel="nofollow" on links that we don't want search engines searching (PageHistory, Diff, Previous versions, Edit etc)
  • meta robots="noindex,follow" on various pages we don't want indexed like RecentChanges
  • meta robots="noindex,nofollow" on pages we don't want search engines looking at at all (eg PageHistory).
  • We moved RecentChanges into an iframe which helps by search engines not indexing terms being on pages that are unrelated to those terms.
  • http://www.wlug.org.nz/sitemap (Note: Please don't open this in your browser. It's for google. It's a big RDF file that will mean nothing to you.) Since I added this a week ago google is indexing only the pages on the wiki that have changed every 24 hours. That means that wlug content is getting into google search results in under 24 hours.
  • The "google trick" where we put up a notice welcoming google users. This probably needs an update, due to the most of above google no longer sends people to the "wrong" wiki page so the need for searching for pages that google should have sent them to is a lot more irrelevant.

• Excellent antispam support

  • Warnings for h-zone fetched and referred pages to make it a disincentive for people to try and claim wiki pages as being "defaced"

  • John's excellent antispam stuff:

    • Based on netblocks
    • Based on useragents
    • Based on content added

• Layout/Theme:

  • Added the sidebar so people can easily see Recent changes. I believe this was the major reason that the wiki took off (people could see that people were making changes to the wiki).
  • Tweaked to be nearly good enough with font support.
  • Obvious indication if IPv6/IPv4 was working.
  • Support for printing wiki pages elegantly.
  • Support for low end browsers (text only, no javascript). Drop the sidebar for browsers with limited screen realistate.
  • Fully UTF8 Clean, including UTF8 page content, and UTF8 page names.
  • Support for automatic linking manpage(8) style wikiwords.
  • Support for / based wiki namespace.
  • Support for multiple vhosts showing the same content without worry about being redirected to other hosts (www,www6,www4,www2) useful for testing.
  • Error Haiku's

• Services:

  • SOAP Interface
  • Meeting Reminder Bot / Committee Reminder bot etc
  • PCI Device Database.
  • Customised RecentChanges for the sidebar
  • wlug member plugin
  • Support for three markup formats (interwikimap, old markup and new markup).
  • Added "by UserName" to the "Last Edited" box at the bottom.

• Other:

  • IPv6 Support.
  • Extremely aggressive caching to reduce bandwidth costs (It dropped our bandwidth usage by at least 25%). This also made google happier to index our site more frequently.
  • Faster postgres support (doesn't lock needlessly)
  • full text searching through greenstone (with a wiki plugin for this)
  • wanted wiki generation
  • Easy extention through plugins, and easily hackable source
  • Support for gzipping pages being sent.
  • Easily backed up, modified, and interrogated backend (postgres) vs phpwiki's default (dbm).

And thats just off the top of my head -- PerryLorier