The Technology Behind This Site

Because this site itself is a digital media project I'd like to explain some details of the arcane inner workings of this website, a.k.a. "How did he do that?"

Wiki Core

At its core there is the excellent PmWiki wiki system. I chose to use a wiki rather than a "real" content management system (CMS) because i feel closer to the code, so to say, when using a wiki. I am a programmer type of person, and as such it just feels "right" to edit wiki markup in order to achieve a desired effect.

Furthermore I'm the only author on this site, so many benefits of CMSs don't apply here, and lastly I've already successfully used this wiki system as a collaboration platform in a number of university projects before, reducing the time needed for set up.

To hide the fact that this site operates upon a wiki engine and give it a less wiki-ish look only some small changes from a standard PmWiki installation were made, essentially using the clean URLs recipe and hiding the action links (edit a page, show revisions etc.) if the user is not logged in.

Additional Components

PmWiki is easily extendable with so-called "recipes" (plug-in scripts) that provide functionality that is not part of the wiki core. A huge collection of available recipes is available from the PmWiki Cookbook.

This site uses three additional recipes:

• Thumblist2 that generates thumbnails from uploaded image files and displays all kinds of galleries
• Highslide a neat JavaScript program that opens images full size on screen
• Flowplayer to embed a Flash component for video playback into the pages. The actual recipe used on this site is modified by me to use the current version 3 of Flowplayer (the original recipe uses Flowplayer 2).