Windows Desktop Install

Why install Tiki on a desktop ?

Tiki is typically used on a server. However, there are cases where installing on a server is not ideal or necessary.

Tiki can be used as a personal knowledge base
Testing out Tiki before getting a host
Easier to install & test locally
A low-importance Intranet

Tiki uses a standard database so you will be able to transfer all your data to another Tiki installation later on if you wish.

Is Tiki complicated to install ?

Tiki is fairly easy to install thanks to the install script. However, it is not yet a double click experience Windows users are used to. It gets complicated because Tiki relies on three major software components to run:

A PHP (scripting language) interpreter
A Web server (usually Apache)
A database (usually MySQL)

These three components are needed to run Tiki. The nice folks at EasyPHP have bundled these three plus phpMyAdmin (to administer your database via a browser). Once these applications installed, a Tiki database must be created and a Tiki MySQL user must be created with appropriate privileges.

For details please see:

Optional extra steps

Activate some features

Click Admin (click!) and then the first icon, Choose what you want to use. As always you can click the help icon at the top of the page to get some information on what you can do.

Create a new user and a group

Click Users from the Admin menu to add users.
Click Groups from the Admin menu to add groups.
From Admin groups click assign perms to assign the right permissions to your groups.

You probably need to spend some time there so that everyone has access to and only to what it should access.

Raise PHP's memory limit

Although PHP should run Tiki with 8MB of memory only, it's likely that you will need to set it to 16 MB even if it seems to work at most places.

Enable GD

GD is an graphic library used to perform manipulations on images. Image galleries need such a library. Since GD is bundled with EasyPHP, all you need to do to get image galleries working is to uncomment the line in php.ini that includes GD's DLL and restart Apache.

Install GraphViz and/or Mapserver

If you want to use WIKIGRAPH plugin, you need to install GraphViz. Maps need Mapserver to work.