DokuWiki is a wiki application licensed under GPLv2 and written in the PHP programming language. It works on plain text files and thus does not need a database. Its syntax is similar to the one used by MediaWiki. It is often recommended as a more lightweight, easier to customize alternative to MediaWiki. The 'Doku' in DokuWiki is short for Dokumentation which in German means documentation. Because DokuWiki does not require a database, it can be installed on local PCs, flash drives, and folders synced with file hosting services (Dropbox) or file synchronization programs (syncthing). History DokuWiki was created by Andreas Gohr in June 2004. In July the first official release was published on Freshmeat (now known as Freecode). Originally DokuWiki used a simple list of regular expressions to transform wiki syntax into HTML. A big step forward in the development was the re-design of the parser and the renderer mechanisms based on contributions by Harry Fuecks in January 2005. The new design made use of the then-new object-oriented features of PHP4. The new parser and the introduction of a cache mechanism led to significant performance improvements, thus making DokuWiki usable for larger projects. The new parser also prepared DokuWiki for the introduction of a generic plugin interface which simplified the development and maintenance of syntax-based plugins. Over the years additional plugin mechanisms followed which allowed 3rd-party developers to extend nearly all aspects of the wiki software. The introduction of DokuWiki into the Debian and Gentoo Linux distributions in April and July 2005 respectively significantly increased the visibility of the software. The DokuWiki logo is the result of a design contest. The winning logo, designed by Esther Brunner, represents editing pages (by pencils of different colors, i.e. different people) and linking them. For many years, DokuWiki's source code was managed through the Darcs distributed version control system. In 2010 a switch to Git was made, making use of GitHub for hosting. Today, DokuWiki is one of the most popular wiki engines available and has achieved significant usage with stable interest over time. Release history Since 2011, releases are named after Discworld characters. Main features Installation and Requirements DokuWiki requires only a webserver and PHP; no database is needed. It can run on cheap web hosting servers and is usually installed by simply unpacking. Additional plugins may have additional requirements. Revision control DokuWiki stores all versions of each wiki page, allowing the