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Saturday, May 31st, 2014, 4:11 pm

PhpWiki is Obsolete and PHP is to Blame

TEN years ago (or more) I installed PhpWiki. I used it to manage communications with family and friends (privately), then to collaborate with colleagues (I had co-authored papers at the time, so needed to manage version changes) in a publicly-accessible installation (my second installation) of an up-to-date version of PhpWiki. It was up-to-date at the time, but not anymore. I later installed PhpWiki once again in iuron.com. It was the main CMS there (my only site to be managed primarily by PhpWiki).

PhpWiki is an important piece of software because it was the first public-available piece of software running a wiki using PHP. It goes back to 1999 when very few people knew what a wiki was. Its authors deserves big thanks for releasing it under the GPL.

I have found that some people — like myself — had their data ‘locked’/’trapped’ inside PhpWiki and as PHP is not backward-compatible they sought a way out (PhpWiki just stopped working with an upgrade of PHP). Various bits of wiki software offer importers of PhpWiki, but they don’t deal with the database directly, they require exporting of data (which earlier versions of PhpWiki don’t appear to have, except perhaps from the command line). Upgrading PhpWiki is hard because my host for this Web site offers no access to PHP log/error files and things do not work as expected. The only way to really view the Wiki data at the moment is through PHPMyAdmin. What a mess.

Having spent several hours wrestling with this issue of no upgrade and no export available (I checked numerous importers), I am left with no choice but to manually migrate the data to some other Wiki software. I have already set up FOSWiki and MediaWiki before, but I might be curious enough to try something ‘new’ (or exotic) like PmWiki, DokuWiki, WikkaWiki. The problem, however, is that they too might become deprecated/unmaintained one day in the future, leading to the same problem I am having right now.

PhpWiki is still being developed (just not frequently) and there are newer releases. I will always fondly remember the one Wiki software that I set up and used before people knew much about Wikis (except perhaps the example of WikiPedia). Here are some final screenshots of the Wikis that will soon go dark, despite the fact that I customised them a great deal and modified the code to suit my needs.

If only PHP was eager to keep old software functional (compatible with newer versions of PHP) this wouldn’t have happened. I still have several other CMSs to go through, trying to upgrade, hack, or export from. Why? Well, because a forced upgrade to PHP 5.3 will kill them. I mostly blame PHP here. It’s an applications killer. It didn’t have to end like this and I am not the first to complain about it.

PhpWiki

PhpWiki private

One Response to “PhpWiki is Obsolete and PHP is to Blame”

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