Installing and Using Friki 1.1

Installing Friki is quite straightforward if you are familiar with Java Servlets. If not, please have a play with your Servlet engine until you are happy with setting up at least initialisation parameters, and optionally servlet aliases.

Overview

The simplest start up is to unjar the friki classes from frikiclasses.jar into a directory in your CLASSPATH or monitored by your servlet runner. Then set up the initialisation parameters and an alias if you want to use one, copy the supplied database file and page templates into your specified directory, put the logo in the /icons directory of your webserver and away you go.

If you have access to the servlet server configuration you may wish to leave the classes in the frikiclasses.jar file and tell the servlet server to use it. If you don't have access to the /icons directory (or there isn't one), you will need to put the logo in some other web-accessible directory and edit the page templates to refer to the new place.

Installation in detail

Friki accepts three initialisation parameters: dir, servlet and startpage. The most important is dir which should contain the local path to the directory where your Friki database file (friki.prp) and your page templates (get.html, edit.html, confirm.html, match.html) live. The other two are optional, defaulting to the values shown in the example below. Note that the servlet parameter must match the alias or class name which you use to invoke Friki. It's used to generate URLs for the likes of the edit button.

To configure Apache JServ for friki, for example, add something like the following lines to your zone properties file:

servlet.friki.code=com.efsol.friki.FrikiServlet
servlet.friki.initArgs=dir=/wherever/you/want,startpage=Welcome,servlet=friki

Customizing Friki

The simplest way to Customize Friki is to edit the pages it contains! If you want more than that, you can do several other things too:

• Delete a Page
  As the "owner" of a Friki instance, you can delete pages from the site. I wouldn't recommend it, but if you need to you need to. It makes a bit more sense to do this when you are first setting up a Friki site based on an existing page set (such as the minimal set of pages supplied with Friki). To delete a page, first fully stop Friki, however you do that on your servlet engine, then delete the offending line from friki.prp using a text editor. If you don't stop Friki first, your changes will be overwritten the next time anyone changes a page using Friki. Remember to restart Friki when you have made your changes

• Rename a Page
  This is similar to delete a page (stop, edit friki.prp, restart), except that the edit is slightly more complex. As well as changing the page name (the text before the ':' on the line) you may want to do a search and replace for the name prefixed with '@' to change any links too.

• Change the Icon
  One simple change which can alter the look of your particular Friki is to change the icon. As long as Friki can find a "friki.gif", it will display it.

• Change the Template Pages
  For more sweeping changes, feel free to change the template pages. Only the names need to remain the same, everything else may be changed. Once you've played with Friki a bit and got the hang of the query arguments, you can convert the method to POST to hide them, or convert operations like "edit" to links rather than form buttons if you like. Changing the template pages gives you the freedom to lay out the pages however you like, and use any (or no) images.

• Enable HTML formatting
  One neat thing that you can do, is actually "enhance" Friki by removing some text from the "get" template! If you remove the <pre> and </pre> around the %text% symbol, Friki will allow page formatting using HTML at no extra cost. It's "turned off" in the default Friki, as it also eats line breaks (requiring <p> or <br> tags) and can cause confusion if page authors want to use < or > characters. It's a trade-off, so Experiment.

Building Friki from Source

The supplied jar file contains the complete source for Friki, as well as some unit tests written using JUnit. If you don't have JUnit, you can safely ignore or delete all the files in com.efsol.friki.tests. Other than that, just compile all the files to somewhere useful, and jar up the class files if you prefer.

Keep in touch.

Please let me (frank@efsol.com) know how you get on, any problems you encounter, any interesting things you do with Friki, and any changes you make. I hope it's useful, or at least intersting.