Dokuwiki supports scaffolding. Sometimes you might want to have every page in a certain namespace based on a common skeleton. For example, in the address namespace you could have an already prepared table, which only needs to be filled with data. This can be easily achieved with so called “namespace templates”.

When a page is created, DokuWiki looks up whether a template file exists and it shows it within the editor window. The templates therefore are .txt files and should contain wiki markup.

Two kinds of template files can be used:

• _template.txt, which will be used in the current namespace (but not below).
• __template.txt (note the two leading underscores), will cover the current namespace and all namespaces below as well (thus this kind of template will be inherited).

If both (normal and inherited) templates are present in the same namespace, the normal _template.txt will take precedence when a new page is created. This allows the pages of the top namespace to be differentiated from all pages of any sub-namespaces inherited below, which could become quite handy.

NOTE: Any changes to a.m. template files will only effect newly created pages and existing pages are always left untouched.

One way to create the template file is to:

1. use the wiki to save a page with the content that you want to use as a template into the appropriate namespace
2. use FTP or WebDAV to rename it as _template.txt

However, one should prefer the TemplatePagename Plugin if possible (see explanations below).

The content of the file is just standard wiki markup.

Inside of the file, you may also use some replacement patterns to make the template a little more dynamic.

You can't edit the _template.txt through DokuWiki (only someone who can edit the files inside the filesystem folders (usually an administrator using FTP or WebDAV) can modify these files). There are three ways to accomplish this, though:

• the easiest is using the TemplatePagename plugin which let you change the default templatenames _template and __template into another name. E.g. c_template and i_template. These files are considered normal editable wikipages because they don't start with an underscore.
• or by setting up through symbolic links

NOTE: This section contains instructions for use on a Linux server and will not work on a Windows system.

This way, you can store your templates in a special namespace, and make symlinks for DokuWiki to find them. You can also choose to make a specific template non-editable by removing its particular symlink.

1. Create a namespace called “templates”, or something similar.
2. In this namespace, create a page for each Namespace Template that you wish to be editable.
3. Follow the instructions given above, but make _template.txt a hard link ¹⁾ to the correct page under your templates namespace. You now have a template that can be modified easily via the wiki interface.

Another way is to create symlinks in the folder itself. Thus you create a template.txt which is a symbolic link to the _template.txt, in it's own namespace.

cd /var/www/html/dokuwiki/data/pages/namespace/something
ln -s _template.txt template.txt

For these softlinks to work, you might need the FollowSymLinks option set for this directory in your webserver's configuration.

NOTE: This section contains instructions for use on a Windows server and will not work on a Linux system.

Open up command prompt (cmd.exe) on the server, and browse to the location you with there to be a template. Use the MKLINK command to create a symbolic link.

cd c:\inetpub\wiki\data\pages\namespace\something
mklink template.txt _template.txt

Additional template features are implemented by plugins.

• TemplatePagename Plugin can change the names of _template and __template in your choice via configuration manager. Has as defaults respectively c_template and i_template. This plugin will let you choose normal wiki pages as template so that they are editable via the wiki interface.

• TemplateByName Plugin extends available templates with
  • ~yourpagename.txt for the page named yourpagename in the current namespace
  • ~yournamespace.txt for all pages in the subnamespace named yournamespace
  • and variants for deeper namespaces too and some other templates e.g. for start pages.

All these plugins are only editable via the file system.

• NewPageTemplate Plugin adds a URL parameter that defines which existing page from the wiki is loaded as the template. Every page allowed by ACL is available.

• Snippets Plugin adds a button to the editor toolbar which allows to easily insert templates while editing a page. The shown templates needs to be list on one page, default snippets.

• Headerfooter Plugin adds header text or footer text to pages only when they are displayed.

Problem: An unexpected error occurs “no timestamp” when server (Linux Ubuntu) cannot write the directory /dokuwiki/data/pages/namespace. This might happen, when the namespace directory is created by the admin as <root> in order to put the namespace template file in /dokuwiki/data/pages/namespace/, before creating the first page.

1. Solution: Before establishing the hidden template file, first create a dummy page via the DokuWiki GUI, like so: yourserver/doku.php?id=namespace:dummy&do=edit. This allows DokuWiki to create the namespace directory under own control and assures full write permissions for DokuWiki on the created directory.

2. Solution: The admin <root> should be able to change owner and group settings through the chown command (e.g., chown www-data:www-data /dokuwiki/data/pages/namespace/ on CLI) and in the first place should establish new directories and files with owner:group settings applicable to the DokuWiki installation anyway.