rmgregory
I've experimented quite a bit with DokuWiki recently and truly appreciate its functionality, flexibility, thorough documentation, and efficiency. I would suggest the product to anyone who asks for my opinion! Having made that statement, I'll point out some nagging issues which, wile not bugs, deserve some attention:
* Footnote capability, while far, far superior to ALL other known Wiki and blog engines, uses a summarization technique that causes footnotes to appear inappropriately out-of-sequence: an author who uses standard "Ibid." notation may find that his reference to the previous footnote is misleading because (for example) footnote #5 has been "moved up" and combined with footnote #1. This is particularly troublesome when manuscripts are transcribed and cannot be edited to match the behaviour. [Again, I'll stress that the DokuWiki footnote capability is better than that of , for example, MediaWiki.]
* It would be helpful if each table was rendered including a unique ID in the opening XHTML tag. To aid in my own efforts, I edited the parser code to call mt_rand() and use its output in such an ID.
* It would be helpful to be able to //easily// force rebuild of the index, complete with a metadata rebuild and rebuild of the sitemap.
DokuWiki's handling of CSS and script is excellent -- I wish others would embrace the same sort of desire for efficiency. Template creation is relatively straightforward. The hooks provided for plugins are also well-written and quite handy.
The data and gallery plugins are excellent enhancements to the core functionality. Other plugins also offer functionality and, when carefully reviewed and edited to suit specific needs, can be useful: it seems unwise, though, to use even the most popular plugins without fully understanding their behaviors and ramifications.
Thanks for a useful product!