Over the last year I've been customizing my applications like Castopod and Dokuwiki, in order to make them easier to navigate by my users. I'm trying to build a sustainable setup where upgrades don't break things I've manually customized in a text editor and I don't waste hours reapplying changes. I'd rather invest time in doing it right this time.

This is my first time managing a self-hosted wiki long-term, so I want to establish good practices early... before I start telling everyone to join up. I also intend to share my findings with the larger Dokuwiki and Castopod projects, because I can see where I could submit some pull requests eventually.

Services are being run out of systemctl --user, so there are no containers involved.

Thanks for any advice!

I’ve begun making numbers of small edits to wording displayed and such across many of my applications, because I find myself engaging with multiple types of people: those with accounts, those who are hyper technical, and those randomly browsing around with no account.

I’ve noticed that system defaults from developers often have no bearing on my actual users, so embracing my ability to customize to taste. :)

Learn to use a source code control system like git.

It is on the list. Thanks.

Update, I've been making my own working directories, which is going well. Especially helpful in Castopod, because it is currently in a limbo development state (moving to Codeberg, moving to plugin architecture, dev is a break). Still figuring out how to hack on it, but not worried about needing to be too picky in terms of version control. https://discuss.online/post/46831101