Development

If you want to contribute to DokuWiki and join the development you should read this page.

A developers guide with some pointers to help you get started with understanding the code is in progress.

The current development code is available through the Darcs repository or as a daily snapshot. You can also browse the source or use the Darcs Webinterface.

The whole source code is well documented and an auto-generated API Reference is available:

• For the develonly API Reference, click here. (This is built daily.)
• For the stable API Reference, click here. (Not maintained by splitbrain.org.)

All development activity is coordinated through the mailinglist ( RSS feed) – if you are interested in changing DokuWiki's codebase you should join the list! Sometimes we discuss development decision live on IRC.

Well what you want to contribute is of course up to you – you should scratch your own itches first. If you need some ideas of what is missing from DokuWiki you should have a look at the bugtracker.

Please also have a look at help wanted, where I list things which could use some improvement and patches would be more than welcome.

I'm not very strict in how the code should be formatted but a few basic things should be attended to when adding code to DokuWiki.

You should indent your code by either 2 or 4 spaces to mark logical blocks. Please do not use tabs. The same number of spaces should be used through the whole file, so check how many spaces the existing code uses and use the same amount.

Opening brackets should start on the same line as the keyword, closing bracket should be aligned below the first letter of the starting keyword. Eg:

if ($foo == "bar"){
  call_bar();
}elseif($foo == "baz"){
  call_baz();
}else{
  call_other();
}

Lines should end with a single linefeed character (UNIX style). Please try to avoid trailing whitespace. Have a look at my .vimrc file on how to spot it easily in VIM.

Each function and class should have a PHPDocumentor style comment, giving at least the function's purpose and its author. Parameter and return value descriptions are nice but only mandatory if they are not obvious. If you enhance an existing function just add another author line.

Example:

/**
 * Check for foo in bar
 *
 * Checks if there is a foo in bar
 *
 * @author   Joe Schmoe <joe@example.com>
 * @param    string $in your input
 * @returns  boolean    true if foo in bar
 *
 */
function is_foo($in){
...
}

These comments are used for the autogenerated API Docs.

You should omit PHP's closing tags (?>) in all files to avoid premature output. This may sound strange but is actually mentioned in the PHP manual:

Note: The closing tag of a PHP block at the end of a file is optional, and in some cases omitting it is helpful when using include() or require(), so unwanted whitespace will not occur at the end of files, and you will still be able to add headers to the response later. It is also handy if you use output buffering, and would not like to see added unwanted whitespace at the end of the parts generated by the included files.

All new code additions should be accompanied by appropriate test cases as described in UnitTesting.

Patches should be sent to the mailinglist. Patches created by darcs are preferred and much simpler to integrate. If darcs is not an option, you should create patches in unified diff format (diff -u) against the latest available daily snapshot.

Here is a list of documents which should help you to understand some of DokuWikis internals.

• Directory Layout – What are all those directories and files?
• functionslist – All functions in Dokuwiki
• Parser – Overview on the parser and render system.
• JavaScript – How is JavaScript integrated into DokuWiki's Userinterface
• CSS – How stylesheets are handled