Gentle Introduction to Tikiwiki Instalation
Recently, I received an email with a question whether I could provide assistance with Tikiwiki installation. I realized that depending on the circumstances, I could provide the following "two levels of assistance": (1) With desktop sharing, it would be possible to perform complete installation of all required prerequisites (web server, database, and PHP) and Tikiwiki itself. (2) Without desktop sharing, I could provide some generic outline of the installation procedure, relevant web links, and point out critical steps along the installation process where things may go wrong.
In this forum post, I will try to outline the generic procedure for Tikiwiki installation:
Basics
Tikiwiki is open source software, written by a large number contributing volunteers. Open source software can be generally installed on large number of platforms and can be tweaked to meet specific requirements. However, my advice is to stay with the basic and most common installation for the beginning. Why? If you stick with the most common installation, you will be able to get more help with possible troubleshooting that may come during installation and later when running the software. If you gain confidence in the software, additional features can be added later... The most common Tikiwiki installation relies on the following: (1) Apache web server, (2) MySQL database, (3) PHP web scripting language, and (4) Tikiwiki itself.
Web Server
Web server is a program that permanently runs on a computer (this type of program is commonly called daemon), and when a user requests a Tikiwiki page (or any other web page), the web server processes this request and send the Tikiwiki page to user's browser. Apache is the most common web server used with Tikiwiki.
Database
Tikiwiki stores most of its data - such as page titles, page text, user information, etc. - in a structured form of database tables (some other wikis store all their data in a plain text files). MySQL is the most common database used with Tikiwiki.
PHP server scripting language
So we have web server that can display web pages based on user's request and a database that stores the data. Tikiwiki itself is a program written in PHP programming language. This program determines how the Tikiwiki pages are diplayed, how are the data saved into the database, etc. In order for the computer to understand the PHP commands, PHP must be installed on the system. PHP is one of the most popular languages for web development and can be downloaded from http://www.php.net.
Tikiwiki
As mentioned earlier, Tikiwiki is "just a program" written in PHP, which determines how Tikiwiki pages are displayed to the end user, how data are saved to the database, etc. Tikiwiki can be downloaded from http://www.tikiwiki.org.
Installation Procedure
In the most typical Tikiwiki installation, the individual programs are usually installed in the following order:
- Apache (web server)
- MySQL (database)
- PHP (programming language)
- Tikiwiki itself - Tikiwiki installation usually consists of copying a bunch of PHP files on the server and running PHP script that will create required database tables.
If you get stuck along the way of Tikiwiki installation, do not hesitate to contact us. We may be able to help.
References
- XAMPP - very handy software distribution that installs Apache, MySQL, PHP, and much more on your system. Available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS. Great tool - highly recommended!
- Tikiwiki official site - this is the place from which to download Tikiwiki installation, get detailed installation instructions, and ask questions the Tikiwiki community.