How would I create a blank wiki?

[The Fatman]

I already have the webspace, and I can get a domain free from work. What I need now is either a how-to, or a helpful push in the right direction.

I want to create a wiki for my office, that can be used for training purposes. It's eventually going to be moved off my personal website onto the companies' intranet, so all the articles/file structure need to be kept locally on my PC so they can be transferred easily.

Long story short, I've been put in charge of learning all the policies of a company my employers acquired, and then train the rest of my team. I want to create a wiki to make my life easy and frankly... to kiss a little ass. I just don't quite know how to do it.

I looked into sites like PBwiki, but those seem to prebuild/host all the data and I couldn't get a straight answer about whether or not it'd be possible to move the whole thing at a later time. Are there any good freeware applications to build a wiki locally and then just FTP it to my webspace? Any other recomendations or ideas anyone can throw me?

 

[Quantum]

I already have the webspace, and I can get a domain free from work. What I need now is either a how-to, or a helpful push in the right direction.

I want to create a wiki for my office, that can be used for training purposes. It's eventually going to be moved off my personal website onto the companies' intranet, so all the articles/file structure need to be kept locally on my PC so they can be transferred easily.

Long story short, I've been put in charge of learning all the policies of a company my employers acquired, and then train the rest of my team. I want to create a wiki to make my life easy and frankly... to kiss a little ass. I just don't quite know how to do it.

I looked into sites like PBwiki, but those seem to prebuild/host all the data and I couldn't get a straight answer about whether or not it'd be possible to move the whole thing at a later time. Are there any good freeware applications to build a wiki locally and then just FTP it to my webspace? Any other recomendations or ideas anyone can throw me?

Do you have PHP or ColdFusion installed on your server? If not you can use a .net solution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software

 

[The Fatman]

I already have the webspace, and I can get a domain free from work. What I need now is either a how-to, or a helpful push in the right direction.

I want to create a wiki for my office, that can be used for training purposes. It's eventually going to be moved off my personal website onto the companies' intranet, so all the articles/file structure need to be kept locally on my PC so they can be transferred easily.

Long story short, I've been put in charge of learning all the policies of a company my employers acquired, and then train the rest of my team. I want to create a wiki to make my life easy and frankly... to kiss a little ass. I just don't quite know how to do it.

I looked into sites like PBwiki, but those seem to prebuild/host all the data and I couldn't get a straight answer about whether or not it'd be possible to move the whole thing at a later time. Are there any good freeware applications to build a wiki locally and then just FTP it to my webspace? Any other recomendations or ideas anyone can throw me?

Do you have PHP or ColdFusion installed on your server? If not you can use a .net solution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software

lol, let me clarify, I'm pretty much a noob on anything web related. When you say "server" are you referring to my web host? So I should check with the admin or my documentation from 1and1.com?

 

[Quantum]

I already have the webspace, and I can get a domain free from work. What I need now is either a how-to, or a helpful push in the right direction.

I want to create a wiki for my office, that can be used for training purposes. It's eventually going to be moved off my personal website onto the companies' intranet, so all the articles/file structure need to be kept locally on my PC so they can be transferred easily.

Long story short, I've been put in charge of learning all the policies of a company my employers acquired, and then train the rest of my team. I want to create a wiki to make my life easy and frankly... to kiss a little ass. I just don't quite know how to do it.

I looked into sites like PBwiki, but those seem to prebuild/host all the data and I couldn't get a straight answer about whether or not it'd be possible to move the whole thing at a later time. Are there any good freeware applications to build a wiki locally and then just FTP it to my webspace? Any other recomendations or ideas anyone can throw me?

Do you have PHP or ColdFusion installed on your server? If not you can use a .net solution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software

lol, let me clarify, I'm pretty much a noob on anything web related. When you say "server" are you referring to my web host? So I should check with the admin or my documentation from 1and1.com?

How does a non techie end up on a trek forum? Anyway What you need to find out is what is any type of application servers if any are running on your webserver provided by your web hosting company. Some examples are PHP, ColdFusion, ASP, JSP, PERL, PYTHON and Ruby on Rails. Once you find the out from 1and1.com then you can decided which type of wikis are compatible with you site. For example you can't run a php based wiki on a ColdFusion Server. The link I gave you earlier has a great list of Wikis that yo ucan choose from.

 

[The Fatman]

LOL, in my defense, it's not that I'm a non-techie...I just focus on hardware, and I do a little bit of OS work. I've pretty much kept my blinders on towards anything web-related until recently.

but, thank you for the information, it's definitely pointed me in the right direction

 

[smithaa02]

For a setup, I would highly recommend a PHP wiki. It will be completely free and will have better community support online.

It shouldn't be too hard to get this running. For starters you should contact your webhosting company and make sure they offer PHP and MySQL. If they don't I would suggest getting another webhosting company (you're probably not going to use a lot of bandwidth so you could get one of those cheap 30-40 dollar a year webhosting packages that should have everything you need (let me know if you need links). Or...you could build your own webserver which is a lot of fun. You could get Ubuntu's free server edition, set it up on a spare computer at work, and because it comes with a webserver (apache), php and mysql you would be all set. Just type in the IP address of the machine (or localhost if you're debugging locally) and this can work on your website. This might be a good idea if you want to develop this at home as well.

Once you have your server setup you will want to choose a wiki package and install. There are lots of choices for free php wiki's... Here is a nice list of software choices (including non-php wiki's if you really want to go in that direction): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software#PHP-based My vote would be for Media Wiki (what wikipedia was built on): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki

If you ever want to move your wiki this should be too bad... You could just download all the files and upload them to the new source (there is a small possibility that you would have to change permission and possible internal file references but this shouldn't be too bad). Then you would have to do a database dump from your old source and import it into your new server (most hosting packages should have tools to do db dumps and imports).