DCC Technical Wiki

The Computer Center, Help Desk and Teaching Learning Center generate large quantities of internal information. That information tends to get tied up with only the people with which it relates, and when someone needs that information they need to find out which people know it. To remedy this, by popular demand, I selected and installed "TikiWiki" as a collaborative content management system on our server. I first had to upgrade the webserver of significantly: Apache 2.2.6, PHP 5.2.4, MySQL 5.0.45, a full house of up to date, source compiled goodness.

TikiWiki itself required some modifications to work with our LDAP system, which makes me very grateful that it is open source: I was able rewrite a good portion of the login process and have it continue to work. The next step of course is to write the changes I've made into a plugin so as to be able to share it with the TikiWiki community, problem is I'm not being paid to do that so I have to do it on my own time, maybe over the summer.

The real challenge for me was not the rabid dependency filling involved with attempting to install and configure the requirements on a somewhat out of date RHEL4 server, nor rewriting the login such that it gained group permissions from LDAP but explaining how people are supposed to use it. Thankfully the TikiWiki community also provides some great demonstrations that I relied heavily upon.

Update

Well folks, it seems as though the week this took was in vain and if anything the campus will get an account with Confluence, which is by no means a bad idea.