Q I’m new to PmWiki, where can I find some basic help for getting started?

The Basic Editing page is a good start. From there, you can just follow the navigational links at the bottom of the page (they are called WikiTrails) to the next pages, or to the Documentation Index page, which provides an outline style index of essential documentation pages, organized from basic to advanced.

Q How do I include special characters on my wiki pages?

Use character codes to insert special characters, such as Copyright (©) and Trademark (® or ™) symbols, that don’t appear on your keyboard.

Q Why are separate lines of text in the markup combined into a single line on output?

PmWiki normally treats consecutive lines of text as being a paragraph, and merges and wraps lines together on output. This is consistent with most other wiki packages. However, an author can use the (:linebreaks:) directive to cause separate lines of markup text to be kept as separate lines in the output.

Q Can I just enter HTML directly?

By default (and by design), PmWiki does not support the use of HTML elements in the editable markup for wiki pages. There are a number of reasons for this described in the PmWikiPhilosophy and PmWiki:Audiences. Basically, Pm feels that enabling HTML markup within wiki pages in a collaborative environment has the effect of excluding some potential authors from being able to edit pages, as well as posing a number of display and security issues. However, a site administrator can use the Cookbook:EnableHTML recipe to enable the use of HTML markup directly in pages.

Q How do I put a link that will open as a new window?

Use the %newwin% wikistyle, as in:

%newwin%http://www.example.com/

Q How do I place a mailing address in a page?

Use the mailto: markup, as in one of the following:

    mailto:myaddress@example.com
    [[mailto:myaddress@example.com]]
    [[mailto:myaddress@example.com | email me]]

See also Cookbook:EProtect for information on protecting email addresses from spammers.

Q How do I make a WikiWord link to an external page instead of a WikiPage?

Use link markup. There are two formats:

    [[http://www.example.com/ | WikiWord]]
    [[WikiWord -> http://www.example.com/]]

Q How do I find all of the pages that link to another page (i.e., backlinks)?

Use the link= option of the (:pagelist:) directive, as in

    (:pagelist link=SomePage:)   -- show all links to SomePage
    (:pagelist link={$FullName}:)  -- show all links to the current page

Q How do I create nice tables similar to Product X?

See tables and table directives.

Q Can I define table headers using the table directive markup?

No, but you can with Cookbook:AdvancedTableDirectives. See Pm’s reply to pending PITS:00535

Q Is there a way to remove page history from page files?

1. Administrators can clean page histories using the Cookbook:ExpireDiff recipe.

2. Administrators with FTP file access can download individual pages from the wiki.d directory, open them in a text editor, manually remove history, and re-upload the files to wiki.d/ directory. Care must be exercised, when manually editing a page file, to preserve the minimum required elements of the page and avoid corrupting its contents. See PageFileFormat#creating.

3. Edit the page. Select all the contents of the edit text area and cut them to the clipboard. Enter delete into the text area and click on the save and edit button. Select all the contents of the edit text area and paste the contents of the clipboard over them. Click on the save button. This will remove all of the page’s history up to the final save in which the pasted material is re-added.

Q How can I restrict viewing the page history to people with edit permission?

In the local/config.php file, set

Q How can I configure my site to always exclude wiki-related pages from searches?

Try the following in your local/config.php file. See also Cookbook:SearchPatterns.

## Exclude Certain pages / groups from search results.
$SearchPatterns['default'][] = '!\\.(All)?Recent(Changes|Uploads|Comments)$!';
$SearchPatterns['default'][] = '!\\.Group(Print)?(Header|Footer|Attributes)$!';
$SearchPatterns['default'][] = '!\\.(Left|Right|Side)(Bar|Menu|Note)$!';
$SearchPatterns['default'][] = '!^Site\\.!';
$SearchPatterns['default'][] = '!^PmWiki\\.!';

If you add $SearchPatterns['default']... to exclude groups and pages from pagelist and search output, you can include the omitted pages by using “list=all” in the pagelist or search parameters.

Q How can I use the RSS <enclosure> tag for podcasting?

For podcasting of mp3 files, simply attach an mp3 file to the page with the same name as the page (i.e., for a page named Podcast.Episode4, one would attach to that page a file named “Episode4.mp3″). The file is automatically picked up by ?action=rss and used as an enclosure.

The set of potential enclosures is given by the $RSSEnclosureFmt array, thus

allows podcasting in mp3, wma, and ogg formats.

Q How to add “summary” to the title in a rss feed (ie. with ?action=rss)?

Add this line in you local/config.php

Q How to add feed image?

Add the following to local/config.php (this example is for ?action=rss):

$FeedFmt['rss']['feed']['image'] =
"<title>Logo title</title>
 <link>http://www.example.com/</link>
 <url>http://www.example.com/images/logo.gif</url>
 <width>120</width>
 <height>60</height>";

Q How do I insert RSS news feeds into PmWiki pages?

See Cookbook:RssFeedDisplay.

Q How can I specify default feed options in a configuration file instead of always placing them in the url?

For example, if you want ?action=rss to default to ?action=rss&group=News&order=-time&count=10, try the following in a local customization file:

   if ($action == 'rss')
     SDVA($_REQUEST, array(
       'group' => 'News',
       'order' => '-time',
       'count' => 10));