If you cannot run PhpWiki on top of a relational database like
MySQL or Postgresql, and your system does not support DBA files
or (worse) has a broken implementation like NDBM on Solaris or 
GDBM on Linux, then a flat file Wiki should work for you. 

Installation is similar to using a DBA file for storing the pages.
You should read the main INSTALL file before this one (it's not long
and complicated so go ahead and we'll wait for you right here).

INSTALLATION NOTES for 1.3

Set DATABASE_TYPE = file in config/config.ini,
check DATABASE_DIRECTORY not to start with /tmp,
and fire up the wiki url in your browser.
The webserver will then start to create this directory with 
the correct permissions and populate the database.

INSTALLATION NOTES for 1.2

First, edit lib/config.php and set the database to "file":

   $WhichDatabase = 'file'; // use one of "dbm", "mysql", "pgsql", "msql",
			    // or "file"


Now, the key thing is you need a directory that the web server can 
read and write to. This is where it will store current and archived
pages.

If you have root access the next section applies to you. If you don't
have root access, skip down to the section "I DON'T HAVE ROOT ACCESS"
to see what options you have.

Choose where you want to have the pages stored; on my system I put
them in a directory under the PhpWiki root directory. That is, I
installed my PhpWiki in /home/swain/public_html/flatfiletest/phpwiki.
I created a directory called "pages" like this:

[root@localhost phpwiki]# mkdir pages

This creates a new directory:

[swain@localhost phpwiki]$ ls -l
total 65
-rw-r--r--    1 swain    swain        1776 Dec 22 16:10 CREDITS
-rw-r--r--    1 swain    swain        6323 Dec 12 16:53 DBLIB.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 swain    swain       10373 Nov  5 22:19 HISTORY
-rw-r--r--    1 swain    swain        3241 Oct  8 15:08 INSTALL
-rw-r--r--    1 swain    swain        1241 Oct  8 14:12 INSTALL.mSQL
-rw-r--r--    1 swain    swain        1584 Oct  8 14:12 INSTALL.mysql
-rw-r--r--    1 swain    swain        2001 Oct  8 15:19 INSTALL.pgsql
-rw-r--r--    1 swain    swain       18106 Jun  2  2000 LICENSE
-rw-r--r--    1 swain    swain        2873 Dec 12 16:24 README
drwxrwxr-x    2 swain    swain        1024 Jan  1 18:46 admin
-rw-r--r--    1 swain    swain        2366 Nov 13 05:59 admin.php
drwxrwxr-x    2 swain    swain        1024 Jan  1 18:46 images
-rw-r--r--    1 swain    swain        1305 Nov  8 10:34 index.php
drwxrwxr-x    2 swain    swain        1024 Jan  3 22:44 lib
drwxrwxr-x    6 swain    swain        1024 Jan  1 18:46 locale
drwxrwxr-x    4 swain    swain        1024 Jan  1 18:50 pages
drwxrwxr-x    2 swain    swain        1024 Jan  1 18:46 pgsrc
drwxrwxr-x    2 swain    swain        1024 Jan  1 18:46 schemas
drwxrwxr-x    2 swain    swain        1024 Jan  1 18:46 templates

Next, I'm going to change the owner of the directory. Your web server
probably runs as user "nobody," so I log in as root and run the chown
command:

[swain@localhost phpwiki]$ su
Password: 
[root@localhost phpwiki]# chown nobody:nobody pages

Now the directory is read/writable by "nobody" and should work
fine. If your web server runs as a different user substitute the
appropriate name.


I DON'T HAVE ROOT ACCESS...

If you do not have root access to your machine you are in a tougher
situation. What you can do is give the directory read/write permission
to anybody, but for security reasons this is a bad idea.

The second thing you can do is have your systems administrator install
PhpWiki for you, or at least follow the steps above to create a
directory owned by the web server.

Another solution is to let the web server create the directory for
you. The drawback to this approach is that you won't be able to edit
the files or copy them from the command line, but most people can live
with this limitation. (This is how you would do it on SourceForge, by
the way; they have a cron job that sweeps the filesystem every few
hours looking for things that are set world writable and change the
permission.) This will require you to TEMPORARILY make the phpwiki/
directory world writable:

cd ..
chmod o+wr phpwiki
cd phpwiki/

and create a PHP file like this:


<html>
<head>
<title>Make a directory</title>
</head>

<?php

   /* 
      I created this to set up server-writable files
      for the Wiki. You shouldn't have world writable files.
   */

   $int = mkdir("pages", 0775);
   if ($int) { echo "mkdir returned $int (success)\n"; }

?>
</html>

Put the file in the phpwiki/ directory and call it through a web
browser. This should create a directory owned by the web server in the
phpwiki/ directory. 

IMPORTANT
Now you need to restore the permissions of the phpwiki directory
itself:

cd ..
chmod 755 phpwiki

If you have problems after all of this, try contacting the
phpwiki-talk list at phpwiki-talk@lists.sourceforge.net.

Steve Wainstead
swain@panix.com