Instiki
How To Use Instiki As Web Site

Instiki is great as a general-purpose CMS (Content Management System). Using a Wiki as CMS makes a lot of sense. Among other things, it’s very easy to create and edit pages.

The key to using Instiki as CMS is the /published/ URLs. For example if you are running Instiki at http://localhost:2500/mywiki/ (where mywiki is the Web name), Instiki will have a “published” version at http://localhost:2500/mywiki/published/ if you turn it on in the Edit Web page. Try it!

Now, http://localhost:2500/mywiki/published/ is not a very nice-looking URL. And you can only access it locally. To use Instiki for your website with Apache and mod_proxy, create two VirtualHost sections in your Apache config file:

<Virtualhost *>
    ServerName edit.mysite.org
    ProxyPass / http://localhost:2500/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:2500/
</Virtualhost>
<Virtualhost *>
    ServerName mysite.org
    ServerAlias www.mysite.org
    ProxyPass / http://localhost:2500/mysite/published/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:2500/mysite/published/
</Virtualhost>

If you have non-wiki content on the same site, you don’t need a separate host name; if you’d prefer to use a subdirectory for publishing, do this:

<Virtualhost *>
    ServerName mysite.org
    ServerAlias www.mysite.org
    ProxyPass /subdir/ http://localhost:2500/mysite/published/
    ProxyPassReverse /subdir/ http://localhost:2500/mysite/published/
</Virtualhost>

You can now access http://edit.mysite.org/ to edit your site (remember to set a password!) and http://www.mysite.org/ to access it. It should have a layout that lacks the Wiki navigation bar with the search button, like http://www.nextangle.com/.

Apache will then proxy requests to the appropriate Instiki server. Remember that Apache is only acting as a proxy: You still need to run Instiki from instiki.rb.