Wiki as Document Management System
I mentioned my personal wiki the other day. I thought I’d post a quick note about using it as a Document Management System. I’m horrible at keeping on top of documents, electronic and physical. Although I have a filing cabinet, I can never remember where I have filed my mail and other personal papers. I do a fairly good job of keeping my My Documents subdirectory organized on my desktop PC, but that doesn’t help me if I need access to files when I’m not at home.
I have been researching open source Document Management Systems, but it occurred to me that I already have a wiki and with my People Keeper project I’m concerned about further fragmenting my personal data across multiple systems. So I decided to try using my personal wiki as a DMS.
I’d say the project is in “beta” at this point, but so far it seems to work well. The nice thing is that I don’t have to worry about filing documents under one location as it’s searchable and I can link to one document from as many different places as I’d like. The wiki already handles the case of multiple versions, so I don’t have to worry about version control. And it’s very simple to set up.
I’m using MediaWiki which isn’t really intended for storing general purpose documents. It considers everything an image. In truth though, it can handle whatever type of file you give it. I only had to make a few small modifications to the LocalSettings.php file.
The following settings needed to be added or modified in LocalSettings.php:
$wgEnableUploads = true; $wgStrictFileExtensions = false; $wgFileExtensions[] = 'doc'; $wgFileExtensions[] = 'xls'; $wgFileExtensions[] = 'pdf'; $wgFileExtensions[] = 'mpp';
The additions to the $wgFileExtensions[] array were not strictly necessary, but I did not want to have to confirm every non-image file upload so I added them. Because I have $wgStrictFileExtensions set to false, I can still upload other file types but I will have to confirm them which is an annoyance so if I had other common file types I would add them to the $wgFileExtensions[] array.
I find that I like to have my document links include a link to the document itself as well as the wiki page for the document upload. It is inconvenient to have to type out the wiki code for that each time, so I have created the following templated called Doclink
[[Media:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] [[:Image:{{{1}}}|(wiki page)]]
This allows wiki entries such as
{{{Doclink|My_Document.doc}}}
to format as
My_Document.doc (wiki page)
Not the most sophisticated template ever devised for MediaWiki but it has already saved me substantial time and tedium.