Hi. I'm Zen Buddhist from Russia, name is Constant Illumination.
About 13 years ago I started my first sites, pure HTML, about teachings that help people.
For personal notes I used some rather simple editor with hierarchical tree of file sections.
Several years ago I was forced to look for another hosting for my site, and decided to develop something more dynamic, with forum, bells and whistles... I turned to Joomla, as I heard it's pretty simple in use.
I also realized that a site made and maintained by one person will never be nearly as successful as a site where many people cooperate. So I decided to add some Wiki. After a short search, DokuWiki seemed to be pretty nice choice. I like its simple syntax, power of many interesting plugins, mostly clean and simple look. (And an option to make it even more minimalistic and compact with some very basic HTML/CSS/PHP knowledge).
Now, the more I use DokuWiki the more I feel it's a good choice. Maybe it's a good engine for all the site, even without a need for that cumbersome Joomla with its Kunena forum (almost impossible to get a good free template and a pain to customize).
DokuWiki is much simpler in use, and with all the plugins for discussions, blogs etc. it probably could satisfy all my needs (we will see soon, as I gradually explore different options).
Unexpectedly, I also found that I can easily use DokuWiki on my own computer ("on a stick" and with Open Server) as a powerful tool for personal notes. It's great, when you try to collect a large corpus of knowledge; when you want to write a book; when you have many different projects and topics to build up notes on. I feel it's probably one of the best of currently existing software for those who want to organize our activity and work mainly with information.
You can have almost everything that you work with in one place, hierarchically organized, hyperlinked, formatted and embedded with any texts that you like (and other browser content, of course). ToDo's and memories of all kinds, materials for writing a book, collection of resources - manuals, tools and tricks (in a form of links, notes, source code fragments etc.), my articles and translations, thoughts and aphorisms, collection of useful blog posts and comments and e-mail fragments, drafts for e-mails etc. Programming projects (notes, planning and other materials), interesting facts, lists of music to listen and movies to watch and books to read, notes on social projects and topics to discuss with people. Now I don't have to search in hundreds of text files plus several hierarchical files on different topics; everything is ready right here. And I can write any thoughts right away, knowing that I will not likely lose those notes, and could return to them later to finish, polish and send out... It gives more freedom and flexibility to our work. More ready-to-use tool means more spontaneity.
Now I created a site dedicated to the search of a new ideology for our world. I want to facilitate a "Social change with wisdom and compassion". Many people now feel that our social life is largely subjected to inhuman mechanisms - economical, political etc. How can we influence that? First of all, we need to gather and discuss. To organize our ideas; to gather our inspiring stories; to invent and coordinate our projects... Wiki seems to be very inviting format for such a work!
And very suitable to gather and organize weakly structured information.
Actually, I have ideas of even better tool, but that would require much time and efforts to develop. Of the software that exists now, DokuWiki is rather universal, flexible, and easy to master customization because it uses widely known data formats.
Maybe the only thing that I feel lacking is the integration between browser and file explorer (for my personal notes installation). Working links to filesystem folders and files could be great. But probably I could easily add that, modifying something like
Actionlink plugin.
My plugins:
Indexmenu is invaluable. Rendering I prefer through
Header3. It's very useful to fold some parts of text with
Folded. And
Outliner is really beautiful. Of course,
Move, Wrap and some others.
For public site I use plugins such as
Avatar, Backup, Captcha, Discussion... Though with Avatar I had one horrible experience. My e-mail login for my public site generated a monster that obviously depicted someone with serious mental health problems. :)) Imagine that: people come to some sweet, totally spiritual site and see the image of the owner as someone really sick. (They likely might think that this image I have drawn myself about myself, right?)
OK, some customizations with login systems, avatars, user pages and messaging will be needed; though I didn't try yet plugins for blogs, tags etc. Will try soon, I think.
Thanks to everyone who invested time and efforts in this loveable useful thing. I mean also those who posted on this forum. I benefitted from answers to my questions, from other discussions and from examples how to customize some things. XRef and other docs were very useful, of course.
I wish all beings to be healthy. Be awakened and happy.
Friends here who improve or help to improve such useful free tools helped me to be happy. I also want to help you: if you have some pressing psychological questions, need advice or just want to orient a bit in your life, there are chances that I could be of use. So you may address me, I'll be glad. And of course welcome to join our social change wiki project:
http://earth.zen-do.ru/
Here is the picture of how I customized my tools and sidebar on my personal notes installation, I think it's rather lovely:
Good day to everybody.