OK, here's some questions to start off with.
1. How broad should the scope of this wiki be?
Being a wiki, it's really gonna go whatever way people make it go. But the initial structure given to it can go a long way toward determining its course.
I think it's safe to say that this wiki won't document all things Linux. But do we only want to document Vector-specific things like VASM, or something broader like the
Slackware Handbook? To start off with, I would suggest sticking with the Vector-only stuff, but build up a good link library for how-tos and general Linux docs.
2. What's the editing policy?
Is it gonna go full anonymous editing access, or require registration? On the wiki I admin, the home page is locked so that only the admin can edit it, but all other pages allow anonymous editing.
3. What should the home page contain?
On my wiki, there's 3 main elements to the home page: a bit of intro text for the wiki itself describing its purpose & rules, a screenshot of the software in question (could be a logo instead), and a table of contents. The table of contents is not a full index of every page in the wiki, rather, it's a set of 6 links in a table that go to topical categories for the rest of the site. Some possible categories: How-to docs, Troubleshooting, About Vector Linux and this wiki, or External Information Resources. What categories should be made goes back to the question on scope - the categories you pick will play a big role in determining the direction the wiki takes. You may not want every category under the sun.
Now for some DokuWiki-specific stuff...
DokuWiki has
quite a few plugins available for it, and you'll probably want to install at least a couple.
The old wiki had problems with defacement, so this should be planned for ASAP. DokuWiki does have some good plugins to help combat this. The first one I would consider is the
Bad Behavior plugin, which basically analyzes a few things about the agent connecting to the site and determines if they're probably a spambot or not. There's also the
Akismet plugin, which sends a copy of the page to a remote server for spam analysis. Personally, I'm not big on the sending to someone else's server part, though. Then there's a plugin that implements everybody's favorite web annoyance, a
CAPTCHA.
Since there's already a forum here, you might consider adding the
BBCode plugin, so that users can use either standard wiki markup, or the BBCode syntax that's used on forums like this.
Someone mentioned putting in a sandbox for the wiki earlier in the thread. That's actually built into DokuWiki, it's called the
Playground. There's also a page documenting
wiki syntax. (If you install the BBCode plugin, that's automatically added to the markup documentation page.) Both of these are linked on the edit page screen, but it wouldn't hurt to have another link to them elsewhere.
One little thing that I'm surprised isn't built into DokuWiki is a
page redirector. I would definitely consider installing that one.
By the way, I notice you don't have nice URLs turned on. I'd activate that. (Let me know if you need help.)
DokuWiki supports
namespaces, but personally I think it's easier to just use a few good category index pages rather than trying to make everyone use the right namespace. One thing you might consider using it for, though, is translations. Basically, you would use something like 'vasm' as the page name for the VASM's documentation in English, and 'es:vasm' for the Spanish version. If people putting things in the wrong namespace becomes a problem, you'll probably want to install the
page move plugin.
Sooner or later I assume you're going to want to do some theme work for the wiki. DokuWiki's theme system is pretty simplistic, just a header, footer, and a couple CSS files. If it seems like a lot of work, you're probably going about it the wrong way.
If down the road you want to extend the scope a bit, it's feasible that you could use DokuWiki for the home page of vectorlinux.com or something. I'd suggest taking a look over the list of plugins and discussing anything interesting in this thread.
