PmWiki

Glossary

This page describes various terms related to PmWiki.

Author
Any user with privileges to write to the wiki.
Admin
The person (or people) who controls access to the wiki, configures the wiki, and generally is the person who installed the wiki.
Configuration file
A specially-named PHP script file where local customizations can take place for a farm, a wiki, a group, or a page.
Default configuration
The way Pm has chosen to set all settings, or an individual setting, by default. For example, $EnablePathInfo is disabled by default. A wiki with no local/config.php file is using the default configuration. Likewise, a farm that only defines $FarmPubDirUrl in farmconfig.php is using the default configuration.

Farm
A group of wikis that share code. Content and formats may or may not be shared. For more farm-related terms, including several which have been deprecated, see WikiFarmTerminology
Farm-wide configuration file
A Wiki Farm?’s local/farmconfig.php file, where any settings (besides $FarmPubDirUrl) customize the default configuration for all of the wikis in a farm.
Full page name
The full page name consists of a group and a name, e.g. Main.WikiSandbox. The variable for the full page name is {$FullName}, which for this page is PmWiki.Glossary. Similarly, the variable for the group is {$Group} which here is PmWiki.
Group
A collection of associated wiki pages; by default this appears in the page name as “Group.Page Name?”. Attributes can be set on all pages in the group simultaneously. The variable for the group is {$Group}, which here is PmWiki.
Local configuration file
A specially-named PHP script where local customizations can take place for an individual wiki. For an entire wiki it’s named local/config.php. Individual groups and pages can also have their own local configuration files.
Local customization
Any deviation from the default configuration. A related phrase is “farm-wide customization”.
Page file name
The page file name is the name of the file that normally stores the data of a page in the directory wiki.d/. This file name is normally built directly from the page name.
Page link
A page link is something that is used to generate a link to a page. For example, the markup [[wiki sandbox]], [[(wiki) sandbox]], WikiSandbox, Main/WikiSandbox, [[Main/wiki sandbox]], [[Main.WikiSandbox | click here]], etc all specify a link to the page ‘Main.WikiSandbox’. In each case PmWiki uses the context of the link to generate a page name from the page link — normally by capitalizing each word found in the link and stripping any characters that aren’t considered valid in page names.
Page name
The page name is a string that PmWiki uses to refer to a page - i.e. it names the page. This could also be considered a handle for the page. The variable for the page name is simply called {$Name}, which for this page is Glossary.
Note that there is no whitespace in page names, and by default PmWiki capitalizes each word in a page’s name. There is however a variable {$Namespaced} where spaces have been inserted, e.g. for the page WikiSandbox this variable would be Wiki Sandbox.
Note that PmWiki also uses the page name to locate per-group and per-page customization files in the local/ subdirectory. For example, browsing Main.WikiSandbox would cause local/Main.WikiSandbox.php and local/Main.php to be loaded if these files existed.
Page title
A page title is the title element of a page, i.e. what is usually shown above the page and in the browser window’s name. This title is normally set via the directive (:title:), but if no such directive is given the title will be automatically generated from the page name. The title of a page is accessed via either the variable {$Title} or the variable {$Titlespaced}. The latter differs in that it uses the spaced version of the name.
Page URI
Page names are used in URIs to tell PmWiki which page is to be loaded or acted upon. The normal form of a page URI is usually one of these two
http://www.example.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.WikiSandbox
http://www.example.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main.WikiSandbox
Note that various aliasing and rewriting tricks can be used to modify this, but PmWiki expects to obtain a page name from the parameter ‘n’ or from the PATH_INFO component following the URI of the script (pmwiki.php).
Note that the parameter ‘n’ takes precedence over PATH_INFO if both are available.
Wikifarm
Synonymous for “farm”.


This page may have a more recent version on pmwiki.org: PmWiki:Glossary, and a talk page: PmWiki:Glossary-Talk.