hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0404.txt

Episode: 404
Title: HPR0404: Tikiwiki
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0404/hpr0404.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 19:52:15

---

Hi everyone, this is a quad 2. This is a hackable video, and I'm going to talk about
some files that you want to throw out for the world to see, or something that you need to build a community around.
Whatever the reason, wikis are obviously useful things, but tiki wiki in particular is useful, at least in my opinion, because
number one is a pretty simple little software. It seems fairly lightweight, it's only about 19 megabytes, which I don't know, maybe that's not lightweight for a wiki,
but it seems simple to me, and it is easy to install. I would say it was certainly no more difficult to install than WordPress or Drupal.
It is easy to configure, much easier, in my opinion, than for instance, media wiki, which I found there was a bit of a learning curve to setting up media wiki,
just to the point where it's ready to accept users and things like that.
So tiki wiki is pretty easy, I think, and it's one of those things that's a good thing. If you're setting up a project, you're probably going to want to spend time on the project more than you're going to want to spend time setting up the infrastructure for the project to be behind the scenes.
So tiki wiki is just kind of a fast solution for a wiki. You can find tiki wiki at tikiwiki.org.
And tikiwiki.org is going to give you a link to the source code, which is found or which rather is hosted on source forage.
So it's a pretty small download. You can download it and it'll dump tikiwiki.org.
3.1 is the most recent version, so that'll just grab tikiwiki.org.tard.bv2. It's the smallest way to download it.
And from there, you can start installing it on either a server that you're hosting yourself in the corner of your bedroom or on a dedicated host from blue host or dream host or one-in-one,
or even a shared host from like GoDaddy or something like that. So I will go through the installation and the initial configuration and you will see how easy it truly is and then you can go do it yourself.
So first of all, to install tikiwiki, you've downloaded the source code and the first step would need to untar it.
So you just do a tard-xjf on the tiki-3.1.tard.bv2 or whatever the file is called.
And that reveals a directory called tiki-3.1. Lots of different ways to get this on your server.
And it goes the same whether you've got, you know, whether it is your own local box that you're actually just hosting yourself or whether it's someone else's server that you've got an account on.
Either way, you need to either ftp or ssh or fish or, you know, get into that box one way or another.
And you're going to want to take all those files, all the files within the tiki-3.1 directory and dump them into the directory that you want the wiki to live.
Now there's different ways to do this. If you just dump it all into your root directory or the root directory of your website.
And when someone goes to the website, like let's say it's the bad apples.info. So someone types into bad apples.info and I've put all those wiki files right there.
And the first page they're going to see is the wiki. Now I may not want this. I may want it to be more of a section of the site.
In which case I would make a directory, let's call it Blender. And then they would go to the bad apples.info slash Blender. And then they'd see the wiki.
So it just kind of depends on how you want this to be set up. If all you want your site to be as a wiki, just put it out in the main root folder of your website.
If you want it to be a little corner of your website and make sure it's self-contained in its own little folder.
What I did was I just dragged the whole tiki-3.1 directory as is just that one directory over to my server.
And I was just doing this via FTP onto my GoDaddy completely free shared hosting account, something that I'm not even paying for.
And so I just dragged the file over to it and let it copy over. And after it was finished, I did all this in Dolphin.
And so I right clicked on it and renamed it to Blender. And from then on, you could go to the bad apples.info slash Blender. And sure enough, there's the wiki.
So now you've dragged everything over to your server. You've got all the files on there that are copied over. Now you're going to need to start messing around with some file permissions.
And this could be the showstopper for you. If whoever your host is, or your shared host, or your dedicated host, whoever that is, or if you don't own the server that you're installing it on and you don't have admin privileges, you're going to need the ability to change file permission.
And if you can't, the installation is not going to work. So there are a couple of different files and they're all delineated. They're all listed on tikiwiki.org and how to install part.
Which you should check out no matter what. It's a good, well actually you should check it out even if you're not going to install tikiwiki. It's actually really funny. It's a very funny read. They have quite a sense of humor in their installation, how to.
But you should check that out. But if you're going to install it, you know, obviously go through that. It's very, very helpful, very clear. Probably going to be a lot more helpful than this little walkthrough is.
But certainly on that document, it tells you which files you need to set with file permissions of usually 755, I think is the one.
I think there's one that they say might work if you do it to like, if you can at least get it up to 644. But you're going to need to get certain files as 755, or else this isn't going to work.
Now the easiest way to see if you've got that ability is to simply, you know, in a file manager that has the ability to do FTP. So the one I used was Dolphin.
So open up your FTP, your server, you know, an FTP link to your server in Dolphin and then find a file, right click on it, and see if you have the ability to change the permissions.
So I did it in Dolphin. I clicked, I right clicked, chose properties. There's a second, there's a tab on the dialog box that pops up that says permissions.
I could see the permissions. I could see that it seems like I could change them. I went to the advanced button and I saw that, yeah, you could change all the permissions.
Whether it's executable, readable, by whom it is readable, writeable, when executable, you could change the sticky bits and all that good stuff.
So that worked. I went and changed permissions on something. I went back to check if it had stuck and it had stuck. So I was able to change permissions.
And then I copied all the files over to my server and went in and changed all the permissions as the installer detailed.
And there's quite a few files. There's like 10 or 11 or 12 files that you're going to need to change the permissions on.
And as long as you can do that, you're probably going to have good luck with the installation. If you can't do that, the install probably just won't work.
Okay, so you've got the wiki essentially on the server. It's not installed or anything. There's no infrastructure and there's no back end for it yet, but it is on your server.
So now let's step away from Tiki for a moment and go down the wonderful world of MySQL and PHP, neither of which I have any real understanding of.
But one thing that you'll need to do before you can install Tiki wiki is make sure that you've got a MySQL database or actually some kind of database.
It'll probably be MySQL running on the back end. You can usually set these up with your host. If it's your own server, you need to set it up yourself.
Typically, you know, there's kind of a, there are very easy quick start kind of guide on MySQL creating databases, giving it a username and a password and all that other good stuff.
So it's pretty simple to do yourself. It's almost even simpler to do if you're doing like a shared account or something like that.
You just, you find your little control panel for your hosting. It might be C panel, it might be something else, but you go into this little control panel, find where they talk about databases or MySQL.
Click on that and click on new database. Go daddy, for instance, even on your free shared hosting account, they offer you, I think, up to 10 databases.
So I just clicked new database. You give the database a name, you give the database a password, you give yourself a username and that's it.
It creates the database, let's call it tqdb and say that we've given ourselves the username and class two and the password through bar.
So now we wouldn't want to forget the username, we wouldn't want to forget the password, and we don't really want to forget the name of the database.
So we'll just take note of that, mental note of that, and now we're ready to set up the tq installer, right?
Not yet. First of all, we need to verify what version of PHP we're running because tqdb is going to require PHP 5.
Again, if you've got a shared host, then you should be able to find in the options of your control panel somewhere, where it'll say like languages or something else.
It could just say PHP, but there should be some place on there that you can choose what version of PHP you're running, or you might have to add it possibly.
I think that certainly I had to upgrade mine from PHP 4 to PHP 5, and when I say upgrade all was me checking a little box, and so having 4 checked, now I've got 5 checked.
So it was pretty simple. Now this is your own server in your own room, then you'll just want to walk over to it and do an update of PHP for yourself.
And you should be good to go. Now you really are ready to install tqwiki.
And the way to do that is quite simple. You simply go to the location of the tqdash install.php file.
That is located on your website in the directory that you put the wiki files. So on mine it was the bad apple dot info slash blender slash tqdash install.php.
It's really quite simple. You go there, it takes you through all the different steps of actually getting the thing installed, and it's really, it's not hard at all.
And it's really easy. The first screen just has you choose your language, and then the next screen is going to be about what mail you want to use, what email you want to use for all the different messages that tq will generate throughout its life.
It will make sure that it has some kind of graphic processing backend, which I don't know what it can use. It says that it uses gd bundles. I don't know what that is actually.
But I'm sure if you use any variety of server side image processing libraries, you know, whether it's image magic or gd, whatever gd is, whatever.
I think as long as you've got some kind of server based image processing, I have a feeling it'll probably work. The next screen will be the database setup.
And this is something that you have to kind of think about, kind of be careful about, but it's pretty easy, and it does, it verifies it before it lets you go further.
So it's something that you can screw up 10 times, and you're not going to get through the installation. So it'll just keep trying until it works, which is a good thing.
So the database type is going to be, well, it's going to be whatever you set up your database as. It'll default to mySQL 4.1 or higher. Then it'll ask for your host name.
Now this is your own server, leaving it as localhost is probably the right answer. If it is not your own server, then you're going to have to find out the host name of the database that is on your, for instance, your shared host.
So go daddy, for their shared host, all the mySQL databases are at a unique location, some weird string, like Fubar, mySQL, Fubar.secureserfer.net.
And so you type, you need to find that out, which happens to be in the database configuration screen. And I think I probably just took a screenshot of that, so I have all the information that I needed.
I sure enough, I did need the host name. So it's a unique host name, not localhost. So I typed that in there. So it's like pq52-ql58.secureserfer.net.
So the database name is whatever you called it, so it'd be tgdb. And then the database user and password is the username and the password of, again, whatever you find it.
Again, the tg installer will attempt to make a connection to this database. And if it can't, it will not continue with the installation.
So you will have to get all this information correct before it will continue. So the chances of doing this wrong, and then having a tg install that doesn't work, very, very slim.
Once you get that right, the next screen will be the tg installer, I mean, the tg profile installer. And this is going to dictate what your default install looks like.
And this is kind of neat, because you got a couple of different choices here. You've got a bare bones default install. You've got one that'll be optimized for a personal blog and profile.
There'll be one for a small organization web presence, a company intranet, a collaborative community. It just depends on what your needs are.
And there are descriptions of each of these installs, so you can see what modules it's loading in and stuff like that.
But for instance, the collaborative community, it's got a forum, it's got the wiki itself, it's got lots of different users and sub admin accounts and things like that.
Whereas the bare bones is literally bare bones, or the personal blog is more geared toward just one person. So it's not going to have the forum, it's not going to have the whatever.
So you can click on the descriptions and see what each one gives you. I went ahead and went with the collaborative community install, because that's what I'm kind of doing with the install that I've got.
But I've done the personal blog and profile as well, where it was just me and another person posting articles, but like information that we might come across online for each other.
So it depends on what you want to use it for, but it's pretty cool and it's pretty handy to have the default profiles available for install.
After that, it is ready to go, it's going to install itself, it'll work a little bit, you know, a couple of moments, doesn't take long, but whatever.
And then it'll ask you to configure some general settings.
The general settings are kind of like, okay, what's the title of the wiki? What is, you know, what's the webmaster email address?
How do you want people to be able to log in? Do you want to use HTTPS or not? What's the admin email? All that other good stuff.
And then it's time to enter your Tiki. That simply locks the installer so that no one can come around and go to Tiki-installed.php.
After they find out that you're running Tiki wiki and screw your install up, but it locks that down and you go to your Tiki wiki install and start setting it up, establishing users or posting content or whatever you think is the first step for your wiki.
And it's literally that easy, it's just that simple.
Thank you for listening to Hack the Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by tarot.net, so head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-T for all of us here.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.