cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/45517222

Over the last year I’ve been customizing my applications like Castopod and Dokuwiki, in order to make them easier to navigate by my users. I’m trying to build a sustainable setup where upgrades don’t break things I’ve manually customized in a text editor and I don’t waste hours reapplying changes. I’d rather invest time in doing it right this time.

This is my first time managing a self-hosted wiki long-term, so I want to establish good practices early… before I start telling everyone to join up. I also intend to share my findings with the larger Dokuwiki and Castopod projects, because I can see where I could submit some pull requests eventually.

Thanks for any advice!

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radioEnglish
    6·
    13 hours ago

    PHP is written in text files which can be managed using any number of version control systems. Pick your poison.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_version-control_software

    As someone else said, you can document your patches with a Docker file, but you’ll still need to track your changes.

    Ultimately, what you’re essentially doing is maintaining a local fork of the code and keeping it synchronised with upstream.

    • kiol@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
      1·
      13 hours ago

      For dokuwiki, I’ve found I can safely edit many menus by copying them from /inc to /conf. So far, so good. I’m tracking the edits from within dokuwiki itself, so far.

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    14 hours ago

    Instead of directly editing the server configuration, put the commands to make the edits in a dockerfile that gets performed on a newly-installed container.

    • kiol@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
      3·
      13 hours ago

      Thanks for the suggestion. In this case, I’m running directly from systemctl --user space. Realizing I was directly editing the files, when I should have copied them out of their default directories to avoid them being overwritten. So, no containers in this case.

      • kiol@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
        1·
        13 hours ago

        For dokuwiki, I’ve copied wiki/inc/lang/en/ over to conf/lang/en for then applying edits

  • kiol@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
    1·
    14 hours ago

    I’ve begun making numbers of small edits to wording displayed and such across many of my applications, because I find myself engaging with multiple types of people: those with accounts, those who are hyper technical, and those randomly browsing around with no account.

    I’ve noticed that system defaults from developers often have no bearing on my actual users, so embracing my ability to customize to taste. :)