PmWiki Concepts

This is a list of PmWiki concepts that is organized in alphabetical order (and can be reused in other Wiki pages on this site). A lot of the terms used on this site are also on this page.

Cookbook The term cookbook is a metaphor for talking about the way Pmwiki organizes topics that are related to customization of Pmwiki through markups, variables, trails etc. The Cookbook is a Pmwiki Group. The actual "how to" content is contained in a Recipe which is usually on one page. Thus the Cookbook group contains user contributed Recipes and a Recipe is a "HowTo". A cookbook is something one refers to frequently when one wants to know if someone has contributed a way to do something when working with PmWiki.

Group A group is a way to organize the content within Pmwiki. A group contains pages which are related in some way to the name of the group. For example, on this site Main, Cookbook, Site and PmWiki are all groups. You will find all Recipes in the Cookbook group. A group can be thought of as a Major Topic that contains pages and each page contains information about a related topic. In PmWiki, a group only contains one level of hierarchy. Despite this limitation, it is possible to have content that is hierarchical in nature by clever structuring of Menus, Trails, Categories and Pagelists. If one is building a PmWiki site about Animals, one possible way to have groups is Animals/ under which would be Classification, Origin, Extinct etc., Vertebrates/ under which would be Fish, Amphibians, Reptiles, Mammals and Mammals/ under which there would be pages Marsupials, Primates, Rodents etc.

Category While each Page must belong to a Group, it may belong to a Category. Groups are real "containers" of pages, but Categories are their virtual counterparts. Thus, in a wiki, one can see the architecture as a matrix:

Pros & Cons:

• Very difficult to change a Page from a Group to another Group. But very easy to change a Page from a Category to another Category.
• A Page cannot belong to more than one Group. A Page can belong to several Categories.
• A Category can cross the border of different Groups.

Markup A markup is a special command to the Pmwiki engine. Markups are embedded within wiki pages and are processed by PmWiki's to generate appropriate HTML that is displayed by the browser. An example of a markup usage on a wiki page is '''Word''' which renders as bold Word when the page is browsed in a browser.

Release Files

    README.txt        An introductory document
    pmwiki.php        The main PmWiki script
    local/            Configuration scripts (local configuration files)
    cookbook/         Recipes (add-ons) from the Cookbook
    docs/             Brief documentation, sample configuration scripts
    pub/              Publicly accessible files
      css/            Extra CSS stylesheet files
      skins/          Layout templates for custom look and feel
    scripts/          Scripts that are part of PmWiki
    wikilib.d/        Bundled default PmWiki pages