Dokuwiki is great

I just finished maintenance task of my old dokuwiki based traveling blog. It’s configured fairly tight, and I set everything I could to read only on filesystem level (dokuwiki refuses to work if the data folder is read only). So I wasn’t worry too much about not keeping it up to date, so thats what I did for the last 3 or so years.
Now I was worried that my webhoster would cut compatibility with PHP 5.* completely so updating seemed like a good idea. Since everything including the inbuilt upgrade plugin was completely out of touch I did the full update procedure. That basically means copying the data and conf folder from the old installation into a brand new installation and deleting the “install.php” file.
It didn’t work right away, because two mandatory config entries were introduced in the meantime that I had to add. I had to fix two additional warnings in the template and afterwards everything was working again.

So.. in case you didn’t know:

Dokuwiki is great

• It doesn’t require a database and keeps everything in plain text files
  • That makes it trivial to move, back up or edit - just use the data folder
  • And everything is human readable and can be grep’ed, diff’ed and whatnot (awk’ed ?)
• It’s been around since 2004 and works largely the same in 2026
• As a PHP blob it can be used without much setup and on simple webhosters
• It provides some nifty capabilities through plugins
  • To be fair: maintenance and long-term availability of plugins is a bit hit-and-miss, but due to the limited changes to the core they often stay usable
• It doesn’t need a container, a managed database, a build pipeline, or a 47-page deployment guide.
• It has survived multiple generations of PHP, web browsers, hosting environments, and web design fashions. It is still as ugly as 2004
  • Again to be fair: this can be improved by templates
• It has its own syntax that is sometimes similar to Markdown and sometimes not, keeping your brain flexible
  • (That was my attempt at a joke) Since 2026 it supports Markdown syntax fully, eliminating one of its biggest flaws

Should you use dokuwiki in 2026

If you want a simple and easy to set up and use wiki or blog engine: absolutely. If you want to use a webhoster even more so.
For anything else: it depends. Especially for real-time collaboration dokuwiki may not be the best choice since it doesn’t support simultaneous editing. For generic office use I would also think twice since it may be a headache to get non-IT users to use the limited editing features.

You could always start with Dokuwiki and move to XWIKI if you feel too limited and want something more “enterprise-ready”. XWIKI has an extension to import dokuwiki data folders. I haven’t tested it, but development is surprisingly active.

If dokuwiki is so great, why am I not using it?

Well, I am. I still maintain my legacy travel blog on dokuwiki and I document technical stuff I need at home and at work on e-bär.de (most of the content is readable by login only, so it may seem unused).
When I started working on the current iteration of this website I started with dokuwiki and middleman in parallel but my goal of having a “nice look” was much easier with the static site builder so it won. For a single editor it does largely the same as dokuwiki: translate easily editable Markdown pages into readable websites. Editing from multiple computers (which I rarely do) happens via GitHub.