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Confluence wiki notes
This page captures some experiences from setting up Confluence as wiki on
a home server.
At atlassian.com they kindly have a free license for personal use. Also see
adaptivist.com and their "Builder" theme, which lets you build a Confluence
installation with a web-page-like feel. They were about to release a version
with a similarly free-for-personal-use license.
I found I could use Apache http modules to rewrite incoming URLs to go to
Confluence, and reverse proxy to rewrite some of what was coming out. But I had
to use a sed filter to rewrite the URLs that appear inside the HTML to get rid
of the /display/spacename prefix before the PageName. The mod_rewrite_html
module would do this more efficiently, but it's not an official part of Apache,
so you have to be able to rebuild or add new modules.
Important macros include {show-to} so you can show things like "add page"
only to registered users; I didn't want others to even realize the site was a
wiki.
Problems with Confluence:
- The RTE is tinyMCE, and it isn't good enough. Also it relies on what's
in your browser, which also isn't very good.
- Hard to remove vestiges of being a wiki. There was HTTP that I couldn't
rewrite somewhere, in some redirects (after logging in for example).
- The RTE would insert newlines around all macro usage, so you couldn't
use macros in-line in a paragraph. The RTE also inserted <br/> and similar
nonsense.
- Didn't want to have a wiki hosted on a home server and worry about the
hole in the firewall. I could have fixed that with a two-layer firewall
solution, where the wiki server was seen as an "outside" system as far as
the rest of the house was concerned.
- My cable modem contract says I shouldn't run servers. They wouldn't care
if the volume was low, but heaven help me if I were popular. I could host
bulky things elsewhere, but this is less convenient.
I tried using a LAMP device from rPath.com but it didn't use any less memory
than Fedora 7 (as far as the "top" display reported anyway). Far better was to
use Fedora (with its extensive RPM-managed package support) but start at
runlevel 3 so there is no X, no GUI. Also turn off selinux and the update
daemon, which have large working-set sizes even when idle.
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This page was last edited
April 26, 2008. |