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Cookbook Basics

Question

What is the Cookbook? How do I use it?

Answer

The PmWiki Cookbook is a collection of "recipes" for using and customizing PmWiki. Anyone can contribute a recipe. Most recipes fall under one of these three categories:

• Tips and Tricks that extend the documentation
• Customization advice for the wiki administrator
• Add-on scripts a wiki administrator can use to extend PmWiki

Tips and Tricks for Authors

Sometimes a Cookbook recipe just explains how to do something in PmWiki. Think of this as "extended documentation". An example is the Backlinks recipe, which describes a particular way to use the (:pagelist:) directive. Other recipes come with add-on scripts written by PHP programmers that extend PmWiki's features with Custom Markup or Custom Actions. But even when you are not a programmer, you can still share your experience with these add-ons in the Cookbook.

Customization advice for Administrators

Other recipes explain how a wiki administrator can implement optional PmWiki features. An example is the AuthUser recipe, which serves as the documentation for the authuser.php script that is bundled with recent versions of PmWiki.

Another example of this type of recipe is the CleanUrls recipe that describes how to "beautify" the URLs that lead to your wiki pages.

Add-on Scripts

Many recipes include add-on scripts that extend PmWiki. These add-on scripts usually belong in your cookbook/ directory, which doesn't contain any scripts when you first install PmWiki. Once the script is copied to your cookbook/ directory you tell PmWiki to use it by putting the following command somewhere in your local/config.php configuration file:

    include_once("$FarmD/cookbook/scriptname.php");

You can use the "$FarmD/" part even if your wiki is not in a WikiFarm.

Many add-on scripts have installation instructions. Look for them either on the Cookbook page or in a README.txt or INSTALL.txt file bundled with the recipe.

See Also

Notes

I created this page because the main cookbook page was growing into having the information contained here, and it was starting to distract from the purpose of that page. This page is not intended to be comprehensive, rather it's to introduce a new user or administrator to the general idea of what they're looking at when they peruse the list of recipes in Cookbook.Cookbook. -Hagan

Contributors

• Hagan Fox 2005-08-01

Comments

See discussion at CookbookBasics-Talk?