What is Instiki?

Admitted, it's YetAnotherWikiClone, but with a strong focus on simplicity of installation and running:

Step 1. Download

Step 2. Run "instiki"

Step 3. Chuckle... "There's no step three!" (TM)

You're now running a perfectly suitable wiki on port 2500 that'll present you with one-step setup, followed by a textarea for the home page on localhost:2500.

Instiki lowers the barriers of interest for when you might consider using a wiki. It's so simple to get running that you'll find yourself using it for anything -- taking notes, brainstorming, organizing a gathering.

Features:

  • Regular expression search: Find deep stuff really fast

  • Revisions: Follow the changes on every page from birth. Rollback to an earlier rev

  • Export to HTML or markup in a zip: Take the entire wiki with you home or for reference

  • RSS feeds to track recently revised pages

  • Multiple webs: Create separate wikis with their own namespace

  • Password-protected webs: Keep it private

  • Authors: Each revision is associated with an author, so you can see who changed what

  • Reference tracker: Which other pages are pointing to the current?

  • Speed: Using Madelein for persistence (all pages are in memory)

  • Three markup choices: Textile (default / RedCloth), Markdown (BlueCloth), and RDoc

  • Embedded webserver: Through WEBrick

  • Internationalization: Wiki words in any latin, greek, cyrillian, or armenian characters

  • Color diffs: Track changes through revisions

Missing:

  • File attachments

Install from gem:

  • Install rubygems

  • Run "gem install instiki"

  • Change to a directory where you want Instiki to keep its data files (for example, ~/instiki/)

  • Run "instiki" - this will create a "storage" directory (for example, ~/instiki/storage), and start a new Wiki service

Make sure that you always launch Instiki from the same working directory, or specify the storage directory in runtime parameters, such as:

instiki --storage ~/instiki/storage

Command-line options:

  • Run "instiki --help"

History:

* 0.9.2: Rollback takes the user to an edit form. The form has to be submitted for the change to take place.
         Changed to use inline style on published pages
         Fixed "forward in time" on the last revision before current page
         Instiki won't log bogus error messages when creating a new Wiki.
         Fixed deprecation warning for Object.id (introduced in Ruby 1.8.2)
         Madeleine upgraded to 0.7.1
         Madeleine snapshots are compressed
         Packaged as a gem
* 0.9.1: Added performance improvements for updating existing pages
         Fixed IP logging and RSS feeds behind proxies [With help from Guan Yang]
         Fixed default storage directory (borked running on Windows) [Spotted by Curt Hibbs]
* 0.9.0: Added aliased links such as [[HomePage|that nice home page]] [Mark Reid]
         Added include other page content with [[!include TableOfContents]] [Mark Reid]
         Added delete orphan pages from the Edit Web screen [by inspiration from Simon Arnaud]
         Added logging of IP address for authors (who's behind the rollback wars)
         Added Categories pages through backlinks (use "categories: news, instiki" on start of line) [Mark Reid]
         Added option to use bracket-style wiki links only (and hence ban WikiWords)
         Added command-line option to specify different storage path
         Added print view without navigation
         Added character and page (2275 characters including spaces) counter (important for student papers)
         Off by default, activate it on the Edit Web screen
         Added LaTeX/PDF integration on Textile installations with pdflatex installed on system (EXPERIMENTAL)
         Use the home page as a table of contents with a unordered list to control sections
         Added limit of 15 to the number of pages included in RSS feed
         Moved static parts of stylesheet to separate file [Lau T?rnskov]
         Fixed better semantics for revision movement [Ryan Singer]
         Fixed color diffs to work much better [Xen/Mertz/Atkins]
         Fixed performance problems for All Pages list [Dennis Mertz]
         Fixed lots of rendering bugs [Mark Reid]
         Upgraded to RedCloth 2.0.11 [integrating the fine work of Dennis Mertz]
* 0.8.9: Added color diffs to see changes between revisions [Bill Atkins]
             They're aren't quite perfect yet as new paragraphs split the <ins> tags (hence 0.8.9, not 0.9.0)
         Added redirect to edit if content of page generates an error
             (so the page doesn't become unusable on bugs in the markup engines)
         Fixed update Web with different address bug [Denis Metz]
         Fixed a bunch of wiki word rendering issues by doing wiki word detection and replacment at once
         Upgraded to BlueCloth 0.0.3b (should fix loads of problems on Markdown wikis)
* 0.8.5: Instiki can now serve as a CMS by running a password-protected web with a published front
         Added version check at startup (Instiki needs Ruby 1.8.1)
* 0.8.1: Actually included RedCloth 2.0.7 in the release
* 0.8.0: NOTE: Single-web wikis created in versions prior to 0.8.0 have "instiki" as their system password
         Accepts wiki words in bracket style. Ex: [[wiki word]], [[c]],  [[We could'nt have done it!]]
         Accepts camel-case wiki words in all latin, greek, cyrillian, and armenian unicode characters
            Many thanks to Guan Yang for building the higher- and lower-case lookup tables
            And thanks to Simon Arnaud for the initial patch that got the work started
         Changed charset to UTF-8
         Cut down on command-line options and replaced them with an per-web config screen
         Added option to extend the stylesheet on a per-web basis to tweak the look in details
         Added simple color options for variety
         Added option to add/remove password protection on each web
         Added the wiki name of the author locking a given page (instead of just "someone")
         Removed single/multi-web distinction -- all Instikis are now multi-web
         Load libraries from an unshifted load path, so that old installed libraries doesn't clash [Emiel van de Laar]
         Keeps the author cookie forever, so you don't have to enter your name again and again
         Fixed XHTML so it validates [Bruce D'Arcus]
         Authors are no longer listed under orphan pages
         Added export to markup (great for backups, potentially for switching wiki engine)
         Don't link wiki words that proceeds from either /, = or ?
           (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiClones, /show/HomePage, cgi.pl?show=WikiWord without escaping)
         Accessing an unexisting page redirects to a different url (/new/PageName)
         Increased snapshot time to just once a day (cuts down on disk storage requirements)
         Made RDoc support work better with 1.8.1 [Mauricio Fern?ndez]
         Added convinient redirect from /wiki/ to /wiki/show/HomePage
         Fixed BlueCloth bug with backticks at start of line
         Updated to RedCloth 2.0.7 (and linked to the new Textile reference)
* 0.7.0: Added Markdown (BlueCloth) and RDoc [Mauricio Fern?ndez] as command-line markup choices
         Added wanted and orphan page lists to All pages (only show up if there's actually orphan or wanted pages)
         Added ISO-8859-1 as XML encoding in RSS feeds (makes FeedReader among others happy for special entities)
         Added proper links in the RSS feed (but the body links are still relative, which NNW and others doesn't grok)
         Added access keys: E => Edit, H => HomePage, A => All Pages, U => Recently Revised, X => Export
         Added password-login through URL (so you can subscribe to feed on a protected web)
         Added web passwords to the feed links for protected webs, so they work without manual login
         Added the web name in small letters above all pages within a web
         Polished authors and recently revised 
         Updated to RedCloth 2.0.6
         Changed content type for RSS feeds to text/xml (makes Mozilla Aggreg8 happy)
         Changed searching to be case insensitive
         Changed HomePage to display the name of the web instead
         Changed exported HTML pages to be valid XHTML (which can be preprocessed by XSLT)
         Fixed broken recently revised
* 0.6.0: Fixed Windows compatibility [Florian]
         Fixed bug that would prevent Madeleine from taking snapshots in Daemon mode
         Added export entire web as HTML in a zip file
         Added RSS feeds
         Added proper getops support for the growing number of options [Florian]
         Added safe mode that forbids style options in RedCloth [Florian]
         Updated RedCloth to 2.0.5
* 0.5.0: NOTE: 0.5.0 is NOT compatible with databases from earlier versions
         Added revisions
         Added multiple webs
         Added password protection for webs on multi-web setups
         Added the notion of authors (that are saved in a cookie)
         Added command-line option for not running as a Daemon on Unix
* 0.3.1: Added option to escape wiki words with \
* 0.3.0: Brought all files into common style (including Textile help on the edit page)
         Added page locking (if someone already is editing a page there's a warning)
         Added daemon abilities on Unix (keep Instiki running after you close the terminal)
         Made port 2500 the default port, so Instiki can be launched by dobbelt-click
         Added Textile cache to speed-up rendering of large pages
         Made WikiWords look like "Wiki Words"
         Updated RedCloth to 2.0.4
* 0.2.5: Upgraded to RedCloth 2.0.2 and Madeleine 0.6.1, which means the
         Windows problems are gone. Also fixed a problem with wikiwords
         that used part of other wikiwords.
* 0.2.0: First public release

Download latest from:

Visit the official Instiki wiki:

License:

  • same as Ruby's


Author

David Heinemeier Hansson

Email

[email protected]

Weblog

www.loudthinking.com