This page attempts to answer the more common questions you might have. Many of the answers refer you to other pages for details.
Questions
Q How do I get my question answered?
The quickest and best way is to join the pmwiki-users mailing list and post your question there. If it really is a frequently-asked question, it will eventually be added to this page.
An alternative way is to leave your question on the Questions page.
Getting help
Q Where can I get help with PmWiki? (This is a pretty vague question!)
See this FAQ, Troubleshooting?, or try a Search.
Error messages
Q What does warning message or error message “xxxxx” mean?
Error/warning questions and answers are on the Troubleshooting? page.
Basic Editing
Q I’m new to PmWiki, where can I find some basic help for getting started?
This Basic Editing page is a good start. From there, you can just follow the navigational links at the bottom of the page (they are called WikiTrails?) to the next pages, or to the Documentation Index page, which provides an outline style index of essential documentation pages, organized from basic to advanced.
Q How do I include special characters on my wiki pages?
Use character codes to insert special characters?, such as Copyright (©) and Trademark (® or ™) symbols, that don’t appear on your keyboard.
(:haloscan:)
Auth User
Q Can I specify authorization group memberships from with local/config.php?
You can as of version 2.1.14 — simply put the group definition into the $AuthUser array:
$AuthUser[‘@editors’] = array(‘alice’, ‘carol’, ‘bob’);
Custom Markup
Q How can I embed JavaScript into a page’s output?
There are several ways to do this. The Cookbook:JavaScript recipe describes a simple means for embedding static JavaScript into web pages using custom markup. For editing JavaScript directly in wiki pages (which can pose various security risks), see the JavaScript-Editable recipe. For JavaScript that is to appear in headers or footers of pages, the skin? template can be modified directly, or <script> statements can be inserted using the $HTMLHeaderFmt array.
Design Notes
Q Why doesn’t PmWiki use hierarchical / nested groups?
It essentially comes down to figuring out how to handle page links between nested groups; if someone can figure out an obvious, intuitive way for authors to do that, then nested groups become plausible. See DesignNotes and PmWiki:HierarchicalGroups.
Q Why don’t PmWiki’s scripts have a closing ?> tag?
All of PmWiki’s scripts now omit the closing ?> tag. The tag is not required, and it avoids problems with unnoticed spaces or blank lines at the end of the file. Also, some file transfer protocols may change the newline character(s) in the file, which can also cause problems. See also the Instruction separation page in the PHP manual.
Q Does PmWiki support WYSIWYG editing (or something like the FCKEditor)?
Short answer: PmWiki provides GUI buttons in a toolbar for common markups, but otherwise does not have WYSIWYG editing. For the reasons why, see PmWiki:WYSIWYG.
Access Keys
Q How can I change the keyboard shortcuts for editing and saving a page?
The default access key values can be changed by site administrators using the string mapping methods to customize a site for other languages by modifying the config.php file. See Internationalizations?. Individuals who want to customize the keys used by their browser can use a similar string mapping approach by posting a special query parameter that sets a cookie on their browser. See Site.Preferences.
Images
Q How do I insert pictures on wiki pages?
Spam
Q I’m getting a lot of spam on my wiki site. How can I password protect the pages?
See Security?, UrlApprovals?, and the Cookbook:Blocklist2 recipe.
Summary pages
Q Why are ‘RecentChanges’ pages editable?
You might want to edit these pages if a spammer creates a page with an unsavory name. To prevent others from editing these pages, insert the following lines into your local/config.php file. Editing then requires the admin password.
## Require admin password to edit RecentChanges (etc.) pages.
if ($action=='edit'
&& preg_match('/\\.(All)?RecentChanges$/', $pagename))
{ $DefaultPasswords['edit'] = '*'; }
Q How do I generate RSS feeds from PmWiki?
Disable formatting
Q How do I put plain text into a wiki page and disable wiki formatting?
You can use the [@TEXT GOES HERE@] markup as explained in the section Escape Sequence TextFormattingRules?. Note that this preserves any text file formatting such as newlines and spaces.
Read-access to pages in the Site wikigroup
Q What pages in the Site wikigroup need to be unrestricted for reading by any user of the wiki?
The following pages probably need to be accessible (see Site.Site):
Category: Questions
