Purple Tree 3 - A Personal Wiki

John Allsup — Sat, 16 May 2026 04:29:50 +0000

I want to explain the ideas of my personal Wiki, Purple Tree 3 (see johnallsup on github). It was written largely from the ground up, with no frameworks, in PHP (backend) and Javascript (frontend). It uses Parsedown to turn markdown into HTML. It wraps Parsedown in a preprocessor, and a postprocessor to turn 'computational poohsticks' (random strings that Parsedown passes through verbatim, usually generated via a hash of the input) back into whatever was hashed into that poohstick. (Basically you form a PHP array where the hash is the key and the protected content is the value.)

Anybody interested. Source on Github.

johnallsup / purple-tree-3

Purple Tree 3, a Wiki system with hierarchical directory structure, capable of managing many subdomains with a single instance.

Purple Tree 3

by John D. Allsup

Purple Tree 3 is the third iteration of the wiki system I use to organise much of my notes and online presence. It is relatively simple, under 10,000 lines of PHP and a under 10,000 lines of Javascript. It uses no frameworks, and a small amount of third party code. The only necessary third party dependency is Parsedown, which converts Markdown into HTML The wiki then uses a wrapper class called PTMD which turns WikiWords into links, and also allows fenced blocks to be given special interpretations, something of which I make copious use.

History

The first Wiki system I used was called WabiSabi, which I used to build my first Wiki, called TheWikiMan. Over a time, I hacked more and more features into it, until it became cumbersome.

Sometime in July 2021 I decided to try my hand at making Youtube coding…

View on GitHub

DEV Community: John Allsup

Purple Tree 3 - A Personal Wiki

johnallsup / purple-tree-3

Purple Tree 3, a Wiki system with hierarchical directory structure, capable of managing many subdomains with a single instance.

Purple Tree 3

History