phpwiki and cgi

So I installed phpwiki (using the flatfile db config) and thought I'd be smart and set it up to run as cgi. Worked great! I was adding and editing pages like mad.

But every time I tried to access the admin part I got server errors (malformed header). After some furious googling I deduced that it was choking on an attempt to use http authentication for access to admin functions. Apparently php running as cgi does not support http auth. So...I tried removing the php-as-cgi .http file and thought I was golden (I was able to use http auth to finally access the admin page, yay) but of course, the script choked with open_basedir restrictions the moment I tried to write anything.

I'm not sure where to go. Maybe just try another wiki. Any suggestions?

OK. Following up on my own post: although it seems overkill, I tried using the MySQL db instead (without php-as-cgi) and things seem to be working as expected both with/without admin login. Fingers crossed.

Hi haggis -

As a general rule, even for 'very small' applications where it might otherwise seem like overkill, we recommend using MySQL. You get to avoid all sorts of weird file access problems, andd believe it or not equivalent scripts using MySQL tend to overload our servers less than anything that deals with flat files.

Glad to hear you've gotten it to work!

- Jeff @ DreamHost
- DH Discussion Forum Admin

Cool. That's good to know. I was actually a little worried that I was over-using MyMySQL. The only downside I can see is the cognitive disconnect that can occur when part of a script is working and the database part (on an entirely different machine) is down. I've learned to recognize the symptoms on my member site. Will learn what it looks like on a wiki :-)

Again, these forums have been so helpful. Thanks!

Heartened by the mention of wikis at Dreamhost, I took a shot at installing PhpWiki myself, and it more or less went smoothly.

...except I can't seem to get user authentication (other than the admin user) working for the life of me. Did you have any luck with that yourself? I'm trying to use either the PhpWiki SQL database (added the appropriate tables), or an existing member MySQL DB, but neither will do anything.

On a semi-related topic, does anybody have experience with any other Wikis? Something with a few more higher-level review features than PhpWiki, maybe?

Eh? There's user authenticaton?

There's supposed to be authentication in there; section 5 (I think--don't have it in front of me now) of the index.php settings file has a bunch of related settings.

You can let people edit anything, logged in or not, or you can make them log in with any username (other than admin, of course), but with no password necessary, to edit non-locked pages. That much works.

In theory, you can also use external authentication; it has sections for LDAP, and external database access, as well as table definitions to add users to its own database. So far I haven't gotten any of those to work, though.