Custom DokuWiki Development

As you may know, here at CosmoCode we love DokuWiki and offer all kinds of services around it. One of these services is custom development. But not always it is about writing completely new features. Often customers just want a little bit more from an existing solution. Today I'd like to present you a few of the projects we recently did for our customers.

One of our customers is using DokuWiki with the Active Directory backend. The first thing they were missing was a way to have users change their profile data and passwords the way you do when using DokuWiki's default auth backend. We implemented this about a year ago and contributed the changes back to the DokuWiki core.

This year our customer asked us to handle another feature of Active Directory: working with expiring passwords. Active Directory Administrators can force users to regularly change their password. The feature our customer was missing is to warn people about a soon to expire password and give the user a hint when he tries to login with an expired account.

The new code is already checked in a separate branch of DokuWiki and will be included in a future release.

The publish plugin allows something similar to German Wikipedia's “Sighted Versions”, where anonymous users will see approved revisions of a page only. Editors with the needed permissions may then review any edit before approving it.

Our customer wanted to use the plugin but asked us for a code review first. This turned out to be a good idea, because the plugin had several bugs and problematic code constructs. We fixed them and sent our changes to the plugin's orginal author. Unfortunately we never heard back from him.

So we followed the rules for adopting an orphaned plugin and are now maintaining the publish plugin ourselves.

PDF export is one of the most wanted features in DokuWiki and there are multiple plugins trying to achieve this. Unfortunately for a very long time no plugin was really user friendly. Most of them required complicated external software, did not support the full UTF-8 range or if they did produced huge PDF files.

Until Luigi Micco released his dw2pdf plugin which is based on the excellent mPDF library.

But one of our customers had some additional requests:

• There where several compatibility problems with plugins they used,
• there was no easy way to adjust the styling according to the Corporate Design (CD) in the PDF.

We were happy to help out of course. The result is a much better and more flexible PDF export that can be easily customized through custom templates and styles.

CosmoCode enhances DokuWiki and plugins and contributes code back to the community. Hire us to help you, too.