Habitat Wiki

== # What is Habitat ==

Habitat is a very small, super fast, easy-to-install and highly customizable content management system designed for personal or community use. Habitat is written in perl, and can use sqlite database as the backend. It even contains a build-in cgi webserver. Habitat can be run from a local computer by an individual user, or installed on a public website serving a group of users.

Habitat is a wiki engine too. Users can quickly build their own websites or information archive using this software by creating, editing and managing wiki pages online. It provides an efficient collaborative platform for an online community to develop software or resources.

Habitat was written by [http://nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~fangq/ Qianqian Fang] who had also founded the collaborative font development project - [http://wenq.org/en/ WenQuanYi?]. Habitat is a result of 5 years continuous improvement of the WenQuanYi? Wiki engine. A lot of new features were added, such as the user management system, database backend, hierarchical wiki page namespace, multi-language support, object-oriented structure and interfaces for plugins.

== # How to install Habitat == To download the latest stable release of Habitat, please browse the download section of [https://sourceforge.net/projects/huc/files/ this page]. <b>If you are using Debian/Ubuntu, please download and install the deb package. It will set up everything for you and you can find Habitat in the "Accessories" menu.</b>

If you want to try out the latest code, you can access it from our SVN. On Unix/Linux/Mac OS, you can use the following svn command:

  svn co https://huc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/huc/trunk/habitat habitat

On Windows, you might want to install [http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads TortoiseSVN] to run the above command.

You may run Habitat in 4 modes: Standard, Extended, Basic and Tiny. Under "Tiny" mode, you can even get most things done with a SINGLE cgi script (only 200kB in size)!

It is recommended to run Habitat under the Standard mode. With this mode, sqlite database is used as the backend, which not only saves a lot of disk space, but also makes it super fast for searching and data backup.

To use the Standard mode, you must make sure the following perl modules are installed on your system:

  DBI, DBD::Sqlite3, Text::Diff, Text::Patch, Crypt::DES

If you are running a Debian/Ubuntu desktop, you can install all the dependencies using the following command:

  sudo apt-get install perl python sqlite3 libdbd-sqlite3-perl \
     libtext-diff-perl libtext-patch-perl libcrypt-des-perl

In most cases, perl and python have already been installed. So, the above command only adds about 1M space. If you do not have permission to install these modules, you can download the pre-compiled modules from our website. Extract the downloaded modules into a subfolder called "lib" under the Habitat main directory.

The next step is to initialize database, please run the following command from Habitat's main folder:

  sqlite3 db/habitatdb.db '.read db/gendb.sql'

For safety reasons, we strongly suggest you setting your own administrator password and site hash. To do so, you need to edit a global config file with command:

  nano habitatdb/config

search for <tt>AdminPass?</tt> and <tt>CaptchaKey?</tt>, replace the values in the quotations to whatever password you prefer. Note, <tt>CaptchaKey?</tt> must be a 16digit hex number. You should also consider moving the <tt>habitatdb</tt> directory to a safe place to avoid direct exposing of the <tt>config</tt> file. A suggested place is <tt>/var/lib/habitatdb/</tt>. Remember to update the value for <tt>DataDir?</tt> variable at the beginning of index.cgi if you have moved the <tt>habitatdb</tt> folder.

Now it is time to test Habitat. Open a terminal, and navigate to the Habitat main folder, and run

 ./runlocal.sh

A browser window will pop-up, and the home page will be displayed. If you prefer to use Chinese (or other languages) as the default language, edit "<tt>index.cgi</tt>", search for <tt>LangID="en"</tt>, and replace en to cn (or other language codes).

== # How to use Habitat ==

If you run Habitat for the first time, please click on the "[http:?action=newlogin Register]" link on the left to create a username/password for yourself. You can also apply the admin password you set previously. Otherwise, you will be considered as an anonymous user and Habitat will only display your IP address.

If you want to make you the only person who can make changes, you have to login as an administrator (by setting the admin password in the register page), and set <tt>EditAllowed?</tt> to 0 in the <tt>config</tt> file. If you want to run Habitat for personal use, this is highly recommended.

To create or modify pages, simply click on the "[http:?action=edit&id=Home Edit this page]" link on the top. Habitat supports many common Wiki markup rules used by [http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TextFormattingRules UseModWiki] or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_markup Wikipedia]. Please check out [Local:HabitatTest? HabitatTest?] and [Local:HabitatNewTest? HabitatNewTest?] pages for more details about formatting.

A new feature of Habitat is the support of hierarchical pages. You can create something like "[[Page/Subpage]]" or "[[Page/Subpage/Subsubpage]]" to represent more complex information or resources.

== # Where to get help ==

Please visit the [http://wenq.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=8 Habitat forum] to get more information and help for using Habitat. We also actively post new versions or patches at the [http://wenq.org/habitat/ Habitat website].

Habitat is an open-source project. You are welcome to contribute and become a developer. Please visit [http://wenq.org/habitat/ Habitat website] for more details.

== # A bigger picture ==

Habitat is a sub-project of the [http://huc.sf.net Human Understandable Computing] (HUC) project. The overall goal of HUC is to promote open, safe, collaborative and intuitive programming models. The focus of the project is to develop software tools that are written in non-obscured scripting languages and driven by human understandable text, graphics and multimedia data (such as voice, video or gesture). Habitat is a demonstration of the basic principles for HUC, as it is written by high-level scripting language and manipulates human understandable text information.

We welcome anyone who embraces the notion of HUC to join us. We believe that the more software following the principles of HUC, the more open and safer our software ecosystem will be.