Recently I found a post on reddit by someone called am2064 about a 'one file wiki' called 'Minty Wiki' written in PHP. I took a look and whilie it was cool, I found it to have some bugs in it. I also found that it needed an extra PHP file to parse markdown to make it work properly. Still, I thought it was a cool idea so I decided to have a go myself.

694 lines of code later, I had something that worked and I thought that I might post about here on my blog. It is by no means finished, but it is in a somewhat usable (hopefully secure) state. I decided that markdown was the most logical choice for editing pages, so I modified Slimdown (by Johnny Broadway) to add internal link parsing and tweaked the bold/italics code to be mroe like Gmail's chat amongst other things. I first found Slimdown when looking for a lightweight markdown parser for comments on this blog.

I named my creation 'Pepperminty Wiki' (after the wiki that gave me the idea). It currently allows you to create and edit pages (although you need access to the server's files to delete pages currently), list all current pages, and view a printable version of a page. It even has a 'search' box that allows you to type in the name of the page you want to view. The search box has an HTML5 <datalist> to provide the autocomplete functionality.

To use it yourself, simply download index.php in the github repository below and put it in a folder on your server. Make sure that you have enabled write access to the folder though, or else you will start to see to rather strange error messages :)

To configure it, simply open the file you downloaded with your favourite text editor. You will find the settings (along with an explanation of each) at the top of the file. Make sure that you change the usernames and passwords!

You can find it on github here: Pepperminty Wiki

A (uneditable) version can be found here: Demo

Soon I will write up a technical post about my efforts to improve the performance of Pepperminty Wiki.