Mac OS X Server

Mac OS X Server 10.5: Introduction To Wiki

I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal

Leopard Server and wiki. It’s cool and it works. But when you’re first looking into it, it might seem a little confusing. So let’s do a simple walkthrough. Here we’re going to enable a wiki in advanced mode for a group called testgroup and we’re going to give a user called testadmin access to edit the wikis and create new ones. To get access to the wiki we’re going to assume a hostname of server.318.com.

First, let’s go into Workgroup Manager and create a new group called testgroup. To do this, open Workgroup Manager, authenticate to Open Directory and click on the New Group icon in the toolbar. Enter a name for the group (testgroup for this example) and check the box for “wiki and blog.” Select the website to publish the wiki to in the Enable the following services for this group on field. Choose who can view and who can write to the wiki and click on the Save button.

Now let’s create a user called testuser. In Workgroup Manager, click on the User list and click on New User. Now enter a name for the user and a password. Then use the Groups tab to put the user into the testgroup group. Now click on Save.

Now that we have a user and group to give access to the wiki let’s go ahead and create a wiki. To do this open Server Admin. If the Web Service has not been enabled yet, click on the server name, click on Settings in the toolbar and then click on the Services tab and place a check in the box for Web. Now click on the web icon and click on the Settings tab. Select a theme for your site and click on Save. Now click on the Sites icon in the toolbar and click on the site you’d like to publish your wiki on. From here click on the Web Services tab and put a checkmark in the Wiki and blog box. Now click on Save. Then Start the web service.

Now you should be able to open up a web browser and go to URL of the server. Remember, do this by host name and not IP. At this point, you’ll see the Groups tab along the top navbar. From here you can click on Groups and then click on the group you want to create the wiki for (testgroup for our test wiki). Now you’ll be asked for a username and password. Enter the testuser you created and the password that you gave to testuser. Now you can click on the + icon to create your first entry into the wiki. Let’s call it testpost.

That’s it. You’ve now created your first wiki article on your new wiki server. Notice that if you enabled calendars and blogs that there will be icons for these in the top nav bar. You can customize everything you see on the screen to give it a more organizational look and feel. For example if you click on the pencil icon you will be able to rename the blog and customize the prebuilt information listed in the Welcome to your Wiki page.