DaWiki Upgrade Is Live
created: 1230614448|%e %B %Y, %H:%M
Ed Johnson
After literally months of trying to upgrade my server at work to the latest revision of Wikidot 1 Open Source, I finally went live tonight! I spent the last 2 days doing my conversion on a VirtualBox VM and after some final testing and tweaking late this afternoon, I was confident enough to port the VM image over to my live server.
Now I hope to devote more time to documenting and developing my installable ISO so that others can get up and running with the open source version quickly and easily.
davanniswiki Server Upgrade
created: 1230348447|%e %B %Y, %H:%M
Ed Johnson
I've spent most of the day working on upgrading my server at work from Ubuntu 7.10 / Apache / PostgreSQL 8.2 / Wikidot rev 195 to Ubuntu 8.04 / Lighttpd / PostgreSQL 8.3 / Wikidot rev 393.
I made an image of the hard drive from my server at work and loaded it on a virtually identical backup server so I wouldn't break my live install. I then did a pg_dumpall > dumpfile of my PostgreSQL 8.2 database. I had a clean Wikidot install running the current version of everything on a Virtualbox VM so I used that to test my upgrade. I dumped the Wikidot database and used my dumpall file to restore it in the VM using psql -d template1 -f dumpfile. I was pleasantly surprised that it seems to load everything just fine (I've had a lot of problems trying to do this before with pgAdmin3).
Next, I had to run the update php file to get the new login pages added to my database. I ran the configure and generate_om scripts, reconfigured my hostname, hosts file, wikidot.ini and lighttpd-wikidot.conf files. Finally, I manually copied my files—sites folder, restarted lighttpd and postgresql and launched my site. It worked!
I was happier than a tornado in a trailer park! After a bit of testing, I'm still happy, but do have a few issues to resolve:
Files and /or MIME types are screwed up for some reason. I noticed that image files were not displaying on pages. The files show up in the files list on the page, but with an improper MIMI type:
Lotus123_App_Error_Fix.jpg HTML document text 272 Bytes info | options
Clicking on the filename causes it to open a page that says:
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
</head>
<body>
<p>The file does not exist.</p>
</body>
</html>
Deleting the file and re-uploading it doesn't work.
Searches do not work - both all sites and individual sites. It seems that the new Lucene search is enabled, but it's not working after I loaded my old database. I suspect there is a table or field missing that's causing this. The weird thing is that it looks like search highlighting is working. For example, I searched for the word health knowing that I have several pages that should be returned. But, I got this:
But clicking the "Benefits" link in my menu, showed this page with the word health highlighted.
I'm going to revert my VM back to a state prior to loading my dumpfile just to confirm this is not a problem with rev 393.
If you have any ideas on what I can do to fix these issues, please help! Thanks!
Update to rev 384
created: 1229866186|%e %B %Y, %H:%M
Ed Johnson
I just installed the new search features that Gabrys documented on his blog (Wikidot Search Ready To Test) on my virtual machine this morning. After fixing one typo in Gabrys instructions, everything seemed to work perfect.
Currently, my test VM has little content and only a couple of sites, so I wasn't able to give the new search features much of a real-world test. I'll report back after I've had a chance to drive it a little harder.
Steps I used to update
From a terminal window:
sudo su -
cd /var/www/wikidot
svn update
cd tests
sudo -u www-data php lucene_bootstrap.php
cd ..
chown www-data:www-data -R .
apt-get install openjdk-6-jre
/etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload
/etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 restart
I appended the following to /etc/crontab:
* * * * * www-data /var/www/wikidot/bin/job.sh UpdateLuceneIndexJob
I added the following to my conf/wikidot.ini file:
[search]
; enables highlighting of search phrase in the resulting documents
highlight = true
; enables the use of Java for searching
use_java = true
Ubuntu 8.04 and Lighttpd
created: 1228586421|%e %B %Y, %H:%M
Ed Johnson
I can finally say that I have a 100% working guide for installing Wikidot 1 Open Source as of rev 317. Piotr Gabryjeluk (
Gabrys - one of the primary developers) has quietly been making a bunch of updates to the SVN repository and fixed some issues with variable substitution in the configuration script.
While I was able to get working installs with prior revisions, the latest changes make it easier for anyone to follow my guide and do a copy/paste job to get most of the work done without knowing a lot about Linux.
The updated guide is here:
Ubuntu 8.04 with Lighttpd Install
Kubuntu 8.10
created: 1228282277|%e %B %Y, %H:%M
Ed Johnson
In an effort to assist 
Doer (see this discussion), I installed Kubuntu 8.10 on a VirtualBox VM. It took a couple of hours to get everything loaded and configured, but in the end I have a working Wikidot install.
The KDE environment in Kubuntu took some getting used to. Frankly, I found the Gnome interface in Ubuntu much easier to navigate the first time I used it. I'm sure it's because it feels more like Windows than Kubuntu's interface does.
The Wikidot SVN repositiry is currently at revision 284 and it's missing a config file that I reported on the dev-list. Once I play with this VM a bit more, I'll see if I can clean it up and make it available for download soon.
Successful Install (completely?)
created: 1223315416|%e %B %Y, %H:%M
ed johnson
As of now it appears I have a 100% working install. The SVN repository needs to have some setup scripts reworked to make the process easier, so the install process I went through required a number of manual edits to various configuration files. I'm fairly certain I tracked them all down since my install is working pretty well. Still some testing to do before I call it a complete success though.
Successful Install (mostly)
created: 1223315058|%e %B %Y, %H:%M
ed johnson
I'm pleased to report that I have a mostly successful installation of Wikidot Open Source Rev 260 running on an Ubuntu 8.04 server on my home network. Unlike my other installs I have done over the past several months, I was actually able to configure this server with the Lighttpd web server rather than Apache server so I could take advantage of all of the new Wikidot features.
I was able to follow the same basic guide I have been using, but had to eliminate several steps and also had to do some extra configuring to get most everything running properly.
I'm going to do some more test install to see if I can clearly nail down the exact steps required to get a successful install done as simply as possible.
Stay tuned!
Only problem found so far is with [[gallery]] and [[image image-file-name]]. This screen shot shows the problem. The gallery can't find any images and the images only appear as links (which, surprisingly, do work).
Getting Started
created: 1223314758|%e %B %Y, %H:%M
ed johnson
I'm just getting this site going and hoping it serves 2 main purposes.
- To be THE place for information of setting up Wikidot Open Source on your own server.
- To give the new Wikidot Pro feature set a good beta test.
I invite all to contribute in any way you can. You can see the categories I have set up in the side menu. I don't have much to share just yet, but with your help and me being able to find some free time, things could grow quickly.
