So one project I’m working on right now is building myself a fully-functional, open-source-software-based practice suite. I started learning web development for the 1.0 of this site because: I’m Cheap. Folks in this area pay literally hundreds or thousands of dollars a year (i did a survey) in platform fees to rent proprietary software like Jotform, Squarespace or WordPress.com hosting, Zoom, and others. Less than $2k TOTAL has passed through my hands this year so: Not Happening.
My current web hosting costs about $20 a year; except I paid for multiple years of VPS hosting up front in uhhh… 2023? The service I bought was discontinued so I’m gonna have to migrate all this shit next year but that’s a next year me problem.
Anyway: Self hosting is cool and there IS a lot of free practice management & educational software out there, but here’s the problem:
- I’m not a licensed healthcare provider so I don’t need HIPPA compliance or prescribing portals
- I’m not a business so I don’t need any employee management shit
- I’m not a school and most educational software is stupid and overkill
Hence the homebrew suite; and what I’m going to be talking about right now:
Dokuwiki!
DokuWiki (link) is a free, open-source platform for creating wikis; from fandom & media & hobby pages to corporate uses. It’s easy, it’s lightweight, and I love it.
Best of all, it has tons of controls for individual, authenticated users and permissions! Something you have to pay a lot for wordpress plugins to use.
The wiki formatting lends itself really well to a class page too, since it’s sorta inherently an educational format.
Example/”Farmer” site
You can see the demo site for classes.herbalist-at-large.xyz here!
This site is both a demo, and serves an important function for the system setup. It’s the “farmer wiki”; which controls “animals” — basically, it’s a multisite setup where I can host as many unique <classname>.herbalist-at-large.xyz pages as I want; and inherit all my formatting and shit from the “farmer”/demo site.
This looks a lot different from the default dokuwiki, so here’s what I did:
- Installed dokuwiki with disallowed new user signups & user-only editing
- Installed the “minimalist” plugin to change the theme to one I liked more
- Changed the colors etc.
- Installed the “farmer” plugin to let me make new sites (will be used more later)
- Installed the “bureaucracy” and “pagemod” plugins to allow for form-based user submissions that put student work on a shared page and/or email them to me
- Actually learned how to use the bureaucracy and pagemod plugins (took some trial and error)
- learned how to spell “bureaucracy”, finally
- Set up my little demo pages and sidebar
- Turned off all editing, sitemap etc features once I was done creating the site to simplify user experience and not show features that don’t have permissions (these could be turned back on via my admin account) — although I’m not sure how to remove the now-broken little “edit” buttons on some of the pages
Right now, I’m working on an non-coding integration to paywall class signups via wordpress woocommerce.
If this sounds cool to you but you have no idea how to self host stuff, I recommend starting with LandChad. The attitude on this site is corny as hell but it is really usable (and they’re right about not paying for services). Use lowendbox to shop for a VPS and porkbun to register your domain. Be sure to add a * wildcard DNS record to your domain so that dokuwiki farms works correctly.
If you feel stumped…hopefully I’ll be launching an asynchronous online workshop (on dokuwiki!) once I have my practice suite set up with the kinks worked out.
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