Getting Started - Best Practices

This tip recommends some best-practices to follow after installing DokuWiki and before announcing and opening your WikiSite to the public. It's part of the list of tips of DokuWiki.

• Create a new folder under inc/lang if no locale folder exists yet, as a copy of the en folder. Rename it to your 2-letter ISO country code and change the values inside lang.php, as well as translate all raw text files to suit your needs.
• Edit the start page content to indicate the most important pages of the wiki, sorted by namespace ranking. Works like a homepage for all other major pages of your wiki. Don't forget to describe in one short sentence the main reason or objectives behind the deployment of the wiki. This start page should have an index of all available namespaces along with a brief description for each one. You can use a plugin like indexmenu to automatically create an index of all namespaces.
• Create a list of all available namespaces that describes each namespace, the top level document of each namespace, and how to add new documents to each namespace. This helps new users to understand the documentation structure in place, while avoiding a proliferation of similar namespaces just because one user doesn't know that another user has created a namespace to group documents on the same subject.
• Create a Quick Syntax page tailored to your Wiki's audience. Users sometimes don't want to go through the full syntax page content, they just want to start editing as soon as possible with a minimal set of formatting rules.
• Add a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page to your wiki. This page will evolve as time goes by and will keep track of most frequent questions that users ask about the wiki site, wiki engine, and content.
• Add a Suggestions Box page to your wiki, so users can post comments or suggestions on how to improve the Wiki. You might want to look into the Discussions plugin.
• Add a Rules, Conventions and Policies page to your wiki. It should describe the content conventions of the main editors and the rules that newcomers must obey in order to add or edit content. This should be locked against editing, since it will be a static content page.
• Add an RSS Feeds page to your wiki. It should describe the options to receive recent changes content through the RSS Feeder, specially if you want to inform users about how to receive changes of a namespace only. See the RSS syndication page as basis for the content of the page in your site.
• Add a template for common formats.

• Add an Enroll-User page that describes a very simple and quick procedure to follow, by visitors that actively participate on the WikiSite. This procedure must explain the Access Control Level concept and how it is related to user authentication and authorization.
• Customize the signature string that users will use for signing their content contributions.