[HN Gopher] Show HN: BookStack - An open source wiki platform an...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: BookStack - An open source wiki platform and alternative
to Confluence
Author : ssddanbrown
Score : 415 points
Date : 2022-01-08 14:12 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bookstackapp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bookstackapp.com)
| LeicaLatte wrote:
| Book stack is great!
| marcodiego wrote:
| Confluence + Jira is a common combination. It is good to have an
| alternative to one of these. Anyone has info or suggestion on
| what are good open source alternatives for Jira?
| budafish wrote:
| Some time ago I was trying to transition to platform to help me
| capture my own personal notes and organise my knowledge.
| BookStack was a good front runner, but I think the lack of mobile
| editing along with the hassle of upgrades made me end up using
| Notion.
|
| Now by all means notion isn't perfect at all, but for me who just
| wanted to start writing notes it seems the right choice at the
| time.
|
| I would like to switch to BookStack as it looks great and is a
| great product, but the one issue that worries me is when it comes
| to upgrades and migrations. Generally I found when upgrading
| database based platforms I end up messing up hugely causing
| myself a huge headache, and then eventually not upgrading at all.
| For example I used Monica CRM, and totally botched the upgrades
| eventually just closing it down and using Google contacts
| instead.
|
| If there was an easy way to solve for that I'd definitely be on
| board with self-hosting it myself. But at the moment I just don't
| have the time to resolve upgrade issues :(
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| I can understand that, Especially since Monica and BookStack
| share the same framework. Database issues do happen
| unfortunately, although I take changes pretty seriously when
| approach schema changes. For those that have requested support
| upon such issues, I've been able to get them up and running
| again in the vast majority of cases.
| throwaway9492 wrote:
| We actually moved from Confluence to Bookstack last year, mainly
| because the EOL for the Atlassian server-licenses. Sure, it has
| less features, but the main function, maintaining content by non-
| tech people works great!
|
| Thanks for creating this app.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Good to hear about another successful transition from
| Confluence!
| LilBytes wrote:
| This looks PERFECT.
|
| I'll trial it out tomorrow. I can see on individual pages
| (books?) you're tracking changes, e.g. created and last edited.
| Are these changes tracked in a history page for version control
| by any chance, ssdanbrown/OP?
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| > Are these changes tracked in a history page for version
| control by any chance, ssdanbrown/OP?
|
| Most system changes (Create, Updated, Delete actions) are
| recorded and displayed in an audit log view for admins. As of
| the most recentl release, you can trigger webhooks upon any of
| these; Video example [1].
|
| Changes to pages (where documentation content exists) do have
| their state changes recorded so you can revert/view/compare
| across versions of a page. The revision limit is set to 50 by
| default (I think) but this is configurable.
|
| You can login to the demo as an admin to preview these features
| if needed [2].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zIp1ruGpoI [2]
| https://demo.bookstackapp.com/login?email=admin@example.com&...
| thecrumb wrote:
| Looks nice. I have an old docuwiki install I need to do something
| with. Might be time to try something new.
| polote wrote:
| Maybe BookStack can do fine for a company with a few dozens of
| employees. But Confluence can handle tens of thousands of
| employees. So I wouldn't label Bookstack as a Confluence
| alternative.
|
| Maybe I'm missing something, but BookStack doesn't even have a
| notion of "teams" only roles. You can't give permission of a file
| to a user, only to all users who have a certain role.
|
| But I'm certainly biased as I'm building a real Confluence
| alternative
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Confluence is terrible in all kinds of other ways. To be frank,
| it's the worst company documentation software I've ever used.
| Discoverability is terrible and it's easy to end up in a
| situation with thousands of pages that quickly fall out of
| maintenance because features for organization are an after
| thought. Its own markup is terrible and its Markdown import
| support similarly so.
|
| Most wikis are terrible at evergreen notes: the only one I can
| think of that might be moving the ball forward is Athens
| Research though I wasn't able to get their self-hosted beta
| running and I host dozens of other services with Compose.
|
| Obsidian might be good too, but they don't seem too keen on
| supporting large business collab usecases even though
| enterprise is a cashcow.
| polote wrote:
| > Confluence is terrible in all kinds of other ways.
|
| I disagree, Confluence is used by tens of thousands of
| organizations and they don't have a very good Sales strategy,
| that means a lot of business choose them when they could have
| choose something else. So I can't buy that it is terrible
| everywhere.
|
| Can we do better ? Hell yeah. But I agree with you that most
| of Confluence competitors are in the SMB space even though
| money is in large enterprise. (But that's why we are building
| Dokkument)
|
| That's not wikis that are bad at evergreen notes, that's
| evergreen notes that are not suitable for sharing with teams.
| Athens or Roam research, or others works well for one person,
| but can't work for teams.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| > Confluence is used by tens of thousands of organizations
| and they don't have a very good Sales strategy, that means
| a lot of business choose them when they could have choose
| something else. So I can't buy that it is terrible
| everywhere.
|
| I don't believe the number of users in an enterprise
| segment buying into a software is at all indicative of the
| usefulness of a piece of software. Atlassian products are
| typically sold between people who will not be the primary
| users of that software.
|
| I have yet to see a SWE missing or desiring an Atlassian
| product. GitHub and other SaaS products yes but never
| Atlassian.
|
| I also disagree that evergreen notes aren't suitable for
| teams. Notes that receive a lot of attention, or are high
| touch, are by definition evergreen. We need more of these
| in orgs but most of us don't know how to tend to our
| companies digital gardens. A huge part of it is wordly
| digital cruft akin to technical debt that accrues. As it
| grows in size it compounds the problem of discoverability.
|
| Note-taking is a skill that receives precious little
| attention, despite being so critical to knowledge work AKA
| anything SWEs work with daily.
| polote wrote:
| At the end of the day, people need to be able to discover
| notes if you want these to be useful. Just talking about
| evergreen notes without offering a way to discover those
| notes by anyone is useless.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Here's where we agree! I'd love better discoverability
| built in to these products. It'd be a huge boon,
| personally, at my workplace (that uses Confluence :-().
| polote wrote:
| That's where Roam Research has a point. Creating a graph
| is appealing, as it is easier to browse and so discover
| things. That's also how Wikipedia works. But Wikipedia
| would never have worked without Google.
|
| In organizations the best thing to do imo is to have
| everyone follow the same rules. Even bad rules that
| everyone follow is better than everyone following its own
| rules. And that's clearly one thing that Confluence sucks
| at. But the rules can't either be the same for anyone
| anywhere, so there is some balance to find. The other
| area that can help discoverability is curation
|
| I would be happy to have a chat with you, don't hesitate
| to reach out to paul at dokkument com
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| > Maybe BookStack can do fine for a company with a few dozens
| of employees. But Confluence can handle tens of thousands of
| employees. So I wouldn't label Bookstack as a Confluence
| alternative.
|
| Sure, but there are a lot of people within that range up to
| tens of thousands. I have had some people mention using
| BookStack within environments towards to tens of thousands
| (Although it's likely a lesser portion enganged). Just because
| it may not achieve that one factor does not discount it as an
| alternative for significant audience.
|
| > Maybe I'm missing something, but BookStack doesn't even have
| a notion of "teams" only roles. You can't give permission of a
| file to a user, only to all users who have a certain role.
|
| Yeah, we don't have the word usage of "Teams" but I'm not sure
| what that'd offer in addition to roles. Role specific
| permissions can be applied to any of the hierarchy elements
| (Including upon page content).
| polote wrote:
| I'm certainly not criticizing BookStack. It actually looks
| super responsive and have a great set of features to manage
| knowledge especially for an open source platform.
|
| As for roles. In organizations of a certain size, the concept
| of role is not organization wide, but team-wide. You will set
| for example the editor role, for some people of the team
| "Operations". Don't really see how this can be done on
| BookStack
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Okay, Not sure I still yet fully understand but I'm not
| really familiar with Confluence so probably just something
| in my blind spot.
|
| Good luck with dokkument! Hope you gain that large-scale
| enterprise segment!
| sirodoht wrote:
| The only issue I have with many Confluence alternatives is that
| they don't support multiple people editing the same document, at
| the same time, a la google docs. Does this? I can't tell from the
| landing page.
| civilized wrote:
| And Confluence supports collaborative editing.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Does not support this at the moment. Currently rebuilding the
| editor with a vision to potentially support that in the future
| although there'd be some hurdles to jump over to get to that
| point.
| hoherd wrote:
| I just ran into this problem with Notion earlier this week. It
| was really disappointing how bad the experience was with even
| just two people trying to work on the same document. I quickly
| gave up.
| polote wrote:
| All real Confluence alternative (Confluence is a b2b software
| not a wiki tool) Notion, Guru, Slab, Slite ... are supporting
| that since their creation.
| tin7in wrote:
| As someone else pointed out, creating a good real time
| editing experience is tricky, especially if the editor is
| block based.
|
| I would add Saga (https://saga.so) to the list of
| alternatives.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| It is extremely offputting that Saga doesn't show a single
| actual product view, the site design makes me think the
| product is equally ugly, and they require signing up to see
| a demo?
|
| When a company hides the product that much and forces you
| to only experience it with a tour guide, it's tacit
| admission the product _sucks_.
| tin7in wrote:
| The hero section of the website is a demo recording of
| the product.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| I agree that it's frustrating when a company hides their
| product, but I think the saga website design is really
| nice and they do have an actual video of the platform
| front and center (Instead of one of those fake simplified
| "representations" that may companies use).
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| I've been working on BookStack for over 6 years now, learning a
| lot about open source project maintainership during that time.
| Originally developed it while looking for a documentation system
| for my mixed-technical-skill workplace. Wanted something easy to
| use without having to get finance involved when increasing our
| user count.
|
| With Confluence backing away from their self-hosted offerings,
| hopefully many will find BookStack useful. It's not supposed to
| be a direct replacement, and the design & content structure is
| quite opinionated, but it can serve many of the same use-cases as
| Confluence had served.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| This is superb. Thanks for making this.
|
| Looks like a good Notion alternative too.
| maineldc wrote:
| Thank you, thank you, thank you. I use started using bookstack
| when I realized that I wanted a place for long form / long term
| storage of documents separates from my Notes / To dos. I love
| it and I deeply appreciate your hard work.
|
| For others that haven't tried it, here's what clicked for me:
| - An opinionated hierarchy of Book -> Chapter (Optional) ->
| Page - Great search - WYSIWYG OR Markdown supported
| - Great integration into Diagrams.net
|
| I love it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Thank you! I love to hear about the specific features people
| enjoy.
|
| > WYSIWYG OR Markdown
|
| I will state that switching between them is pretty flaky at
| the moment, is done at instance level and can cause HTML in
| markdown. Is designed to be choose-once-and-leave. That said,
| in rebuilding the editor I am aiming for easy and instant
| Markdown & WYSIWYG switching within editor.
| tough wrote:
| outline has a nice rich-markdown-text-editor package for
| react based apps in case you can re-use it!
|
| I looked into the LaTeX support of it for a science editor
| projectg
| mjrpes wrote:
| Have you looked at Toast UI Editor (MIT license)?
|
| https://ui.toast.com/tui-editor
|
| I checked out a bunch of text editors on a past project and
| this one has worked very well as a WYSIWYG markdown editor.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Yeah, Got a list of potential options under review for
| our required criteria:
| https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/issues/2738
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Obsidian integration would make me (and likelya bunch of
| its > 400k other users) happy!
| 1cvmask wrote:
| We could potentially add passwordless MFA from saas pass to
| your project. Good luck with it.
| philonoist wrote:
| I apologize but may I know what you mean by "saas pass"?
| yebyen wrote:
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| That's cool. I recently built MFA into the access flow, with
| a sight to extend methods where needed, although any instance
| using the SAML/LDAP/OIDC auth options could enforce MFA on
| the identity provider side.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Bookstack looks like an amazing feat of engineering -- it's
| overwhelmingly the wiki I want to deploy given other F/OSS
| options. just today I was showing it to a friend and it is
| impressive how clean and considered it is. Thanks for
| maintaining and improving this project
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Thank you! This kind of feedback means a lot, provides the
| fuel to avoid burnout.
| iambateman wrote:
| I dove into your Laravel code the other day to see how you
| organized things.
|
| Thanks for making it open so I could learn!
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Happy to help! I will say that I would in no way present it
| as an example of a clean codebase. 6 years of weekend and
| night development, while having significant code
| understanding/learning during that time, has lead to somewhat
| of a mix of ideas and approaches. Constantly trying to re-
| align things though!
| iambateman wrote:
| Totally makes sense!
|
| there's a lot to be learned in any event, since a lot of my
| projects are night/weekend ones too.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Impressive that you've stuck to it for more than six years. I
| remember testing an early version. Looks like you've made a lot
| of improvements in that time.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Thanks! I've learnt a lot in that six years. I've been quite
| proud of our constant, yet steady, pace of development while
| retaining upgrade compatibility (where possible).
| LeicaLatte wrote:
| Book stack is very good.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I remember considering BookStack while looking for a (surprise)
| replacement for Confluence.
|
| The main thing that led me to stop considering it pretty quickly
| is precisely the concept of books - I find it both unnecessarily
| complicated _and_ unnecessarily limiting.
|
| My Org now uses DokuWiki. It has _a lot_ of issues (the
| prosemirror visual editor is a good start, but in beta and out of
| development, for example). But it 's also the least sucking
| option I've found. Most Wiki software severely screws up the
| editing experience, which may not be such a good idea when you
| want to get people to document things. I'm glad Bookstack does
| this right.
| INTPenis wrote:
| As a former DokuWiki user (both pro and privately) the biggest
| issue is when you want to migrate from DokuWiki.
|
| I managed to migrate my private docs from DokuWiki to markdown
| but it wasn't easy and it took some manual editing. I'm much
| happier knowing that it's in Markdown format simply because of
| the options that opens up for me.
| stevofolife wrote:
| Nice work! What was the hardest technical and non technical part
| of this?
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| > What was the hardest technical
|
| That's a tricky one to answer! The authentication systems most
| likely, just because of the different standards and
| configuration that different people demand. I've had to learn
| LDAP, SAML2 and OIDC protocols to a level that allows me to
| confidently add & maintain these systems.
|
| > non technical
|
| Probably issue handling & management, from a mental point of
| view. Dealing with such a range of ideas and requests with an
| ever-growing list of features/issues/support-request has been
| tricky. I've had to learn to change my perspective and goals
| when dealing with GitHub issues.
|
| In general the social side has been a massive point of learning
| and challenge to me. I've recently written about many of these
| more extensively here:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/qrksgh/bookstac...
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| I can't say I would use BookStack. The demo doesn't show the same
| sort of ease of use that Confluence has, nor the features.
|
| I really like Outline https://www.getoutline.com/ as it is open
| source, self hosted and free if you don't use the Enterprise
| features. It really does seem to be a Confluence replacement.
| https://www.getoutline.com/compare/confluence-alternative
| Ostrogodsky wrote:
| Their price ranges left me scratching my head.
|
| 1-10 people: 10 USD/month
|
| 11-100 people: 79 USD/month
|
| 101-250 people: 249 USD/month
| NmAmDa wrote:
| You need to use slack or google for the selfhost setup. Which
| is non starter for many people.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Yeah. I come across this once in a while, go yay, find out
| about the auth requirements, and do a complete 180.
|
| I know I can't tell them how to build their product, but
| really?
| theelix wrote:
| Personally I managed to run Outline using a standard OIDC
| software like Keycloak. While more troublesome it should work
| just fine without external tools
| tommoor wrote:
| Any OIDC compatible authentication provider works now, FWIW
| CPLX wrote:
| I've been looking for something just like this. Does it support
| migration from Confluence? I glanced over the features section
| and didn't see mention of that, but perhaps I missed it?
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Unfortunately no readily available migration path from
| Confluence. I'm not familiar enough with Confluence myself to
| understand the formats and options that we'd need to carry
| across & support.
|
| Our API [1] has recently matured to now support the different
| content types so that could be utilised for such a migration
| job although the API is still growing to cover more
| actions/models.
|
| Have recently been thinking about possibly offering some form
| of paid service support service to help the process and help
| fund the project.
|
| [1] https://demo.bookstackapp.com/api/docs
| Aeolun wrote:
| Oh, prepare for some fun with ADF (atlassian document format)
| if you ever do try to build migration from confluence. On the
| positive side you'll have to deal with only one flavor, but I
| swear they have like 10 different ways to present/format
| their documents across all their products.
|
| Fortunately, a lot of the handling is open sourced in
| atlaskit.
| unixhero wrote:
| Confluence import could be a premium feature you could offer.
| unixhero wrote:
| Great software. Use it a lot. Just wish it had backup and restore
| within the web interface.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| If it only had backup within the interface, would that cover
| most of your wish?
|
| Reason being, I always have troubling thinking about backup AND
| restore, but mostly because restore is a complicated mess
| (Especially when you start thinking about going across
| versions). Just achieving backup within the interface (Of
| database and uploaded files) is much more feasible.
| zekenie wrote:
| It'd be awesome if this thing had mermaidjs support. It's native
| in obsidian and it's such a game changer
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| This is something that has been requested before, although not
| something I'd probably look to include in the core project
| since I attempt to avoid custom formats and syntax where
| possible. That said, I'd like to get to a point where something
| like mermaid.js can easily be added if desired. Over the last
| year the BookStack platform extensibility has grow
| significantly (API, Webhooks, PHP Hooks, View/Language/Icon
| Overries) and I'm looking to continue that to achieve such
| requests without over-stressing the core project itself.
| davidjgraph wrote:
| In diagram under Arrange->Insert->Advanced (obviously).
| anyfactor wrote:
| I haven't used Confluence or BookStack in this case. Does these
| platforms have git like version controlling and collaboration in
| them? What about login and admin stuff? Also gitbased blog
| platform like architecture perhaps?
|
| I am a big fan of journaling, documentation and having a
| knowledge hub. I am not sure what is out there for a monolithic
| yet shared and controllable knowledge hub.
| toper-centage wrote:
| There's is good versionimg in confluence, and also good search.
| The editor is also nice (improved a lot since a few years ago).
| Compared to the mess that is JIRA, I actually like confluence.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| > Does these platforms have git like version controlling and
| collaboration in them?
|
| BookStack does not have git-like versioning but content changes
| are versioned within the database for rollback/compare/viewing.
|
| > What about login and admin stuff?
|
| BookStack has multiple authentication options (Including email
| & password/LDAP/OIDC/SAML2) in addition to admin/user/role
| controls.
| CPLX wrote:
| Another option I've been considering for a change away from
| Confluence is Gitbook. Curious to hear if anyone has done an in-
| depth comparison of these two.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| This can really depend on your use-case and audience.
|
| Things like gitbook (& docusaurus) can often be better for
| focused topics or when serving product documentation to users.
|
| BookStack tends to work better as a mixed-topic, mixed-user
| platform. Along the lines of an internal wiki shared by
| different teams. I've seen people attempt to use BookStack as a
| replacement for GitBook but struggle due to the structure being
| different.
| shdisi wrote:
| Thanks for creating and maintaining BookStack. My company has
| used it for around three years, and recently integrated it with
| Okta for SSO. It's fast, simple to use, and the recent search
| improvements have really made it an excellent product.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Out of interest, does your company support the author via
| sponsorship or other means?
|
| I'm curious... I wondered what the red tape is like in
| organisations that use open source projects like this in order
| to setup a GitHub sponsorship or similar.
|
| In a previous role at a cash-strapped startup I used open
| source software within my team and have to admit I never
| arranged any contributions to the OSS projects - though if I
| had my time again in that role I'd be more mindful about trying
| to do this. Especially I think when the project is a very small
| or "one person" team.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| I recently come across a similar question on Reddit. While I
| can't offer the company perspective I can offer a maintainer
| perspective:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/rwmiwn/recommen.
| ..?
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Great comment and very interesting to read your perspective
| on it.
|
| Really if we're honest, any company using Bookstack should
| be able to afford to chuck you $20/month or something
| (barring perhaps one-person bootstrapped startups). It's
| likely red tape, bureaucracy and the internal culture that
| prevents this more than financial means.
|
| And especially so if support demands are being made of you!
| robjan wrote:
| It's easier if you create some value added service like
| "premium support" or an Active Directory integration
| plugin then charge for that.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Yeah. The reason we're running a lot of our own open
| source stacks is that getting anything officially
| approved has to go through multiple layers of bureaucracy
| and approvals.
|
| Getting approval to throw an open source project some
| money is likely to be even crazier (probably not a
| concept they ever imagined).
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Awesome to hear. Especially happy to hear good feedback
| regarding the search improvements, I spent a good amount of
| time on those and this is the first feedback I've had since.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| This looks really good. I've been looking for a good wiki
| solution. Gonna give this a try in the next few weeks.
| bogwog wrote:
| As someone who hasn't used Confluence, how is this different from
| a regular wiki (e.g. MediaWiki)?
| grogenaut wrote:
| Wysiwyg editor, integrations with Jira queries and other tools
| via UI wizards/widgets.
| bawolff wrote:
| Mediawiki has had a wysiwyg editor for a while now
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| More focused on writing explicit long-form content organized
| into book-like trees (i.e. book -> chapter -> page), instead of
| doing things TheWikiWay. It's much nicer for technical
| documentation IMHO.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Can anyone with experience with multiple wiki platforms compare
| this with XWiki and/or MediaWiki.
|
| I may be asked to update $WORK's wiki, which is currently
| MoinMoin (IIRC), and am looking for anyone with more experience
| so I don't have to start testing from scratch. I've run MediaWiki
| before, but am not beholden to using it just because of
| past/current familiarity.
|
| Importing from MoinMoin would be nice, but not absolutely
| required. LDAP integration (at least for authentication/LDAP
| binds) is mandatory, but LDAP group integration
| (authorization/permissions/roles) isn't mandatory: that can be
| internal to the app. Wouldn't mind it though: either Unix-style
| or AD-style (memberOf).
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Mediawiki is page focused, needing a lot of tweaking to make it
| act like something other than a completely open public page
| editor. Trying to collect pages is annoying ugly; about the
| best you can do is with "categories." Mediawiki tries to do too
| much with document metatags and whatnot. Mediawiki is
| ugly/outdated looking (IMHO) and requires lots of php config
| file editing.
|
| Bookstack has a lot more inherent document organization stuff
| (ie: books>chapters>pages etc), it's easy as hell to
| administer, and it looks gorgeous out of the box.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| > Trying to collect pages is annoying ugly; about the best
| you can do is with "categories."
|
| With vanilla mediawiki, sure. If you use Cargo or SMW, you
| can do pretty much anything you want, especially with Cargo.
| Add in Lua (Scribunto extension) and you have effectively a
| full extra layer in your stack.
|
| (There's also DPL (Dynamic Page List extension) as an option;
| if what you're doing is easy enough to express, and you're
| just trying to build lists of pages, you may be able to get
| away with just doing DPL queries and nothing else beyond
| that.)
|
| It might be more technically complex than you want it to be,
| but it's definitely not limited to categories.
| trynewideas wrote:
| I enjoy Cargo and DPL, they're powerful and great tools for
| automatically aggregating and filtering content, and I used
| both of them a lot at a MW that I was an admin on for
| several years. But it still isn't easy to build an ordered,
| hierarchical, book-like structure with book-like output,
| which was a constant request. It wasn't just technically
| complex (no users wanted to learn how to do it, they wanted
| one person to do it for them), it also didn't do the one
| thing most people wanted it to do.
|
| The Collection extension did that, though, but Wikimedia's
| weird behavior around it and their multiple failed attempts
| at choosing a tech stack for output -- OCG/ZIM,
| PoD/PediaPress, Electron (not that one)/Proton -- much less
| the next step of building that functionality into a usable
| feature in MW, turned me off from trying.
|
| I need to dig into BookStack (I imagine like most wiki
| flavors, it'll lack the templating features in MW that I
| rely on), but the fact that it's built on the book/chapter
| paradigm from the ground up instantly catches my eye.
| jraph wrote:
| Future XWiki employee (should start in March!). Feel free to
| reach out to XWiki [1] [2], they'll be happy to answer your
| question and address your specific needs. They are nice. Feel
| free to contact me if you'd prefer but I'll be less competent
| than them for obvious reasons.
|
| I don't know many things about XWiki yet, but the main
| difference between MediaWiki and XWiki is probably the X in
| XWiki (eXtensible). XWiki is more like a development platform
| to build a website, a blog, or a collaborative platform
| (internal or public) that you can tailor to your needs. What
| you put as contents is highly customizable / scriptable and
| several Wiki syntaxes are supported. The XWiki syntax can be
| extended to support your custom features if needed. There are a
| lot of apps [3] to extend XWiki (some are paid, but open source
| anyway so you can compile them yourself). LDAP is supported.
| XWiki will also provide support or specific developments if
| needed.
|
| MediaWiki is developed for Wikipedia first. That's what you can
| read on XWiki's website anyway. But if you don't need anything
| that MediaWiki doesn't already provide and like its UX, it
| can't be a wrong decision to go for it. Many people outside
| Wikimedia use it and the UX is familiar to _everybody_ , and
| that's huge. Both tools can be self hosted (and MediaWiki is
| quite easy to install), MediaWiki is mostly in PHP, XWiki is in
| Java. XWiki can be hosted for you by XWiki SAS. They'll also
| help handle migrations from Confluence and are currently
| handling a lot of them, and I'm sure they will be interested by
| hearing about migrations from other tools too.
|
| I guess WikiMatrix would be a good starting point [4]. XWiki
| also have comparisons to common collaborative platforms on
| their websites including MediaWiki. They are obviously biased,
| but don't lie neither. You might want to check them out.
|
| I hadn't encountered Bookstack, before. The UI seems quite
| clean. I hope we'll have the pleasure to meet and discuss at
| some point! The UK is not far, we are neighbors. Hmm,
| neighbours!
|
| edit: by the way, you might be interested by XWiki's online
| presentation at FOSDEM on the 5th of February [5], as well as
| any other presentation in the collaboration and content
| management devroom, because not everything collaboration is a
| wiki :-) [6]
|
| [1] https://www.xwiki.org/
|
| [2] https://www.xwiki.com/
|
| [3] https://xwiki.com/en/offerings/products/business-apps
|
| [4]
| https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/moinmoin+mediawiki+xwiki+...
|
| [5] https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/collabxwiki/
|
| [6]
| https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/collaboration_and_con...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There is a "semantic" extension to MediaWiki that makes it
| easier to support many enterprise use cases with data
| visualizations, custom queries (potentially referencing
| information from multiple wiki pages) and the like. It is
| somewhat widely used for wikis other than Wikipedia, that can
| simply defer to the Wikidata project for those needs.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| SMW works okay but if you have technical ability, I'd
| recommend Cargo
| (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cargo) instead.
| It's a somewhat limited SQL wrapper (limited - e.g.
| subqueries aren't supported, which can be annoying on
| occasion but tbh I've only missed them maybe 3 or 4 times,
| wiki queries tend not to be too complicated) which is
| roughly equivalent to SMW in maybe 50% of use cases I've
| encountered, inferior in maybe 2%, and significantly better
| in the rest.
|
| It definitely has a bit of a higher learning curve than
| SMW, especially for non-developers, and even for developers
| there's some kinda weird stuff going on with it (e.g. they
| have this HOLDS syntax sugar and list-type fields as an
| answer to SMW's ability to express one-to-many relations a
| bit more naturally than sql can; also there's this
| cargo_attach parser function that I forget to do 80% of the
| time and that's why my tables don't rebuild properly).
|
| Anyway if anyone does use MediaWiki and is choosing between
| these extensions I'm happy to talk to you about them, this
| is what I do for my job & I have several years experience
| with both (though my SMW experience is somewhat outdated,
| since I switched to Cargo several years ago, and only
| recently have started using SMW again, and that only
| tangentially).
| jraph wrote:
| I didn't know! Linking for whoever would like to look into
| this.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki
| dvdkon wrote:
| I'm currently helping set up a wiki for students of a STEM
| faculty, and we've settled on MoinMoin (v2, that is). We're
| broadly building on a previous MediaWiki setup, which we've
| found to be too "Wikipedia-oriented".
|
| I've looked at a few very extensible and featureful wikis
| (XWiki, Tiki Wiki, TWiki, Foswiki), but for our usecase, they
| seemed overwhelmingly big (I know, I'm not easy to please).
| They're all almost application development/scripting platforms,
| which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it would mean we'd
| have to learn a lot more if we wanted to modify parts of them.
| Of the four mentioned, XWiki looked like the most "polished",
| its conceptual model and code looked maintainable and it has a
| great number of actively developed plugins. If I'm not mistaken
| it even allows writing pages in Markdown, which was one of our
| criteria.
|
| I also looked into taking a very lightweight wiki (LOC in the
| high thousands) and adapting it to our needs, but found that
| most of those didn't have a code model that would lend itself
| well to doing things like swapping out a custom format for
| Markdown, we'd basically be rewriting half the wiki at that
| point. Even DokuWiki, a relatively large project, is too blase
| about running regexes on page contents for my taste.
|
| We looked into BookStack, but didn't think its content model
| would work too well for our idea of a wiki as a "social" site.
| Maybe it's just the terminology, though.
|
| In the end, we ended up running MoinMoin 2. It's in a perpetual
| beta state, but it _is_ actively maintained. The main reason
| was its code quality: It 's small enough that understanding how
| it all fits together is quick, and it's structured so that
| adding functionality or swapping out one part of it is easy (as
| much as it could be for software that's over a decade old,
| anyway). We're programmers anyway, so we decided to go with the
| ability to change the wiki to our liking over initial polish.
| So far, I've made a new theme, wrote a script for migrating
| from MediaWiki, changed out the Markdown parser and added SSO
| with CAS. The changes aren't public yet, but will be soon.
|
| So far I'm happy with our decision, but note that my search was
| heavily subjective, you very likely have other requirements and
| preferences.
|
| EDIT: By the way, the criteria were loosely:
|
| - Modifiability (I wanted a custom theme, needed a non-
| traditional SSO option and could see us getting ambitious about
| custom functionality)
|
| - Hierarchy + ideally tags for organising
|
| - Ability to export some pages into a print version (annually
| published leaflet/book for new students)
|
| - Permission system (which we hopefully won't need to use)
|
| - Storing pages in Markdown (helps with converting for print
| too)
|
| - Macros (I'm a fan, easy-to-write extensions would be just
| fine)
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| This looks really nice.
|
| Atlassian did not consider small businesses with regulatory
| requirements when it decided to push everyone to the cloud.
| Atlassian's cloud cannot ever meet my regulatory requirements, by
| 2024 I need to replace Confluence. There is no way I can pay for
| the cost of the Data Center version of Confluence you'll be able
| to self-host, over $20K/year to self-host Confluence is a non-
| starter.
|
| Does BookStack index uploaded files for search? If so, what
| formats does it support?
|
| Can pages (or books) be exported in common formats?
|
| Any plans to support Postgres in the future?
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| > Does BookStack index uploaded files for search? If so, what
| formats does it support?
|
| No, unfortunately not. You can attach files but we only support
| indexing (And parsing) of core page content. Indexing other
| formats opens up a large branch of maintenance while adding
| potential confusion in the platform in regards to what's
| considered content.
|
| > Can pages (or books) be exported in common formats?
|
| Yeah, Both can be exported as plaintext, markdown, contained-
| html or PDF. The PDF export can be troublesome but works for
| most simple use-cases.
|
| > Any plans to support Postgres in the future?
|
| Not in sight for the near future. I'm not closed off to it but
| there are questions of support and maintainership. My detailed
| thoughts on additional database support can be found here:
| https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/issues/76#issuecom...
| tommica wrote:
| Such a nice tool - we use it at work, and the people managing
| like how simple it us to use!
| npsomaratna wrote:
| Same here. Simple, focused, and easily usable by non-tech
| people. We adopted Bookstack several years ago, and we've never
| looked back.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Great to hear it's been used to some longer term success!
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| That's great to hear, usability has been at the forefront of
| it's design and development.
| drcursor wrote:
| A killer feature would be confluence import.
|
| How do the permissions work ? Same way as confluence (inherited)
| ?
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Sure, See my other comment here in regards to import/migration:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852265
|
| I'm not sure how Confluence permissions work. Within BookStack
| pages (Main content) is generally within a hierarchy of Shelves
| > Books > Chapters > Pages. Both shelves and chapters are
| optional parts of the hierarchy,and Books can be members of
| multiple shelves.
|
| General permissions (Edit/Create/Delete) can be controlled per-
| role, and multiple roles can be assigned to a user. Permissions
| can then be overridden per hierarchy item. Permissions for
| Books and Chapters will cascade to child items unless they're
| overridden.
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| Had a look around, this looks really polished. I would have one
| remark - please consider making tables a first-class feature.
|
| In my experience with Confluence, the easiest and most
| comprehensive way to organize information is with tables. Having
| a quick way to merge, delete, color cells would be great. Right
| now, coloring and merging are hidden away in some menus, and
| deleting cells will shift the bottom toolbar with the table
| upwards, so you can't do it quickly.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Yeah, Tables are a challenge in general. The trouble with them
| from an editor perspective is the range of desired options and
| control (Many each at table, row, cell level) is fairly vast.
|
| I'm currently in the process of building a new content editor
| which I'm hoping would provide better opportunities to make
| such controls more intuitive.
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| It doesn't need to be Word or Excel-levels of options and
| control, less is actually more - for example table cells in
| Confluence can only have 6 colors, and no fancy border styles
| etc. which in my opinion provides a more unified look and
| feel. Just the UX needs to flow smoothly enough, as working
| with tabular data consists of doing many of the same steps
| over and over again.
| [deleted]
| slickdork wrote:
| I've been using this as a personal wiki for a few years now.
| Thank you so much for making it! I really love it.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| No problem, thanks for the positive message!
| eyeball wrote:
| My company is forcing a migration from confluence to sharepoint.
| What a nightmare.
| pSYoniK wrote:
| Really enjoy your project! Setting it up on a free Oracle cloud
| VPS is very straightforward, setting up automated backups is also
| very easy and restoring is again, very very easy! Thank you for
| your hard work on this project, it made me start working on my
| own take on how notes should be handled and it gave me a place to
| keep things that I find interesting and keep notes on everything
| I learned throughout uni over the past couple of years.
|
| Thanks again, your work is really appreciated!
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Thanks! Interesting to hear about the backups and restore being
| easy, I often hear complaints due to not having in-app
| backup/restore but the risk of causing issues, over doing that
| at an infrastructure level (Via mysqldump/file-copies), has
| always been a point of worry for me when thinking down the in-
| app route.
| bloggie wrote:
| I came across your software a few weeks ago when I was looking
| for some kind of locally hosted collaborative documentation suite
| for internal use, basically, a wiki that can be used by people
| who aren't programmers. I was a bit incredulous when I found that
| it is basically expected to use markdown if you want to have a
| wiki. This really raises the barrier to entry and restricts users
| to ones that are technically proficient and have the time to
| learn and deal with markdown. Wysiwyg is a necessity.
|
| Easy content insertion is also necessary. We haven't yet
| integrated bookstack, but I don't see any alternatives (sticking
| with the locally hosted requirement)
| wwarek wrote:
| Not sure if this fully fits your needs but you might want to
| look at Wiki.js. You can self host it, has WYSIWYG editor
| available (as well as HTML and markdown). I'm not associated,
| just use it for some time.
|
| https://js.wiki/
| Vaslo wrote:
| Agree - I self host wiki.js and love it. Easy to figure out.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Yeah, wiki.js is in the same space and seems to be pretty
| great. BookStack and wiki.js have taken quite different
| design & structure choices though so I usually advise trying
| out the demos of both to see what best fits.
| ei8ths wrote:
| one of the things we use confluence for is tagging people to
| tasks. putting pages underneath pages and when things are checked
| off they show up on the parent page so employees have all tasks
| and then the meeting tasks, then plus all the wiki features but
| the above was what sold us on confluence for doing meetings and
| minutes. I haven't been able to find something similar.
| fnord123 wrote:
| Sorry this is nothing like Confluence. On Bookstack you click a
| link and get a new page instantly. This is nothing like
| Confluence where you need to wait 5-8 seconds for each page.
|
| And no, I will never not shit in Atlassian products until they
| fix performance. Trello is the standout. Thanks for not trashing
| it.
| [deleted]
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| I hear this a lot from people switching from Confluence. I
| watched a colleague using Confluence once and was surprised how
| much time was spent looking at those text-placeholder blocks
| while content was presumably loading in the background.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| My favorite is when elements jump around while they load, so
| you're guaranteed to misclick on links. So then you'll have
| to wait again (when going back), because of course the cache
| hasn't been invented yet.
| jraph wrote:
| this reminds me of Bitbucket...
| IceWreck wrote:
| I used to use Dokuwiki as my personal notes app/knowledgebase
| pretty heavily. Switched to Bookstack two years ago and never
| looked back. It has everything you need in a Wiki, no third party
| plugins needed like Dokuwiki.
|
| The API is excellent, and I've used it to build some custom
| stuff. They recently added webhooks too.
|
| And Dan is pretty responsive on Discord if you need help.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words! Always nice to hear happy feedback
| regarding the API, good to know it's getting some use.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Huh, so that's why the last update of Argon was 2 years ago :-)
|
| Thanks for making it! I consider it to be the best theme
| available for DokuWiki and my organization uses a forked
| version of it (https://github.com/fablab-luenen/dokuwiki-
| krypton).
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| I've been planning on rolling this out at work for months now,
| just finished setting up a little server for the office to host
| it on. Its going to help so much.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| That's great, hope it works out well for you!
| rob001 wrote:
| How does this compare to wikijs? This looks very good, but I'm
| already very happy with wikijs.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| If you're happy with wikijs I'd advise that you probably stay
| on it to be honest. WikiJS is a great project. They two differ
| quite a bit in design and structure, if wikijs's structure
| works well for you already you may find yourself fighting
| against the BookStack structure/layout. Can always give the
| demo [1] a go to get an idea.
|
| [1] https://demo.bookstackapp.com/
| tgv wrote:
| Impressive. I'm definitely going to give this a look. Right now,
| we've got our technical docs in Sharepoint (yeah, that
| Sharepoint), mixing its built-in docs and Word docs, and I'd
| really like to get rid of that.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Thanks! My original scenario was a mix of gist code snippets
| and word docs. The horror is when those word docs are version
| by file name (server_docs_final-v2.docx). It definitely helps
| to get things aligned into a platform that people understand
| how to use.
| Sheen96 wrote:
| Glad to see any alternatives to confluence (or Atlassian in
| general). I've used Confluence for a good 4 years or so and for
| the life of me, I can not fathom why anyone would use this for
| storing documentation for code etc, as opposed to storing things
| direct in a repo. I can understand it's use somewhat for business
| folks, but even then, the way of organising things is abysmal,
| every solution (such as rich text editing) feels very off the
| shelf/MVP, uninspiring UI, the list goes on. It feels like most
| companies that use it already use the Atlassian stack of
| JIRA/Bitbucket, then feel the need to tack Confluence onto the
| end because it's there.
| leokennis wrote:
| I think Confluence "shines" as a sort of "Wikipedia for your
| company" with the added benefit that it's simple enough that
| anyone can create a nice looking page and there are plugins to
| cater to different disciplines.
|
| And yes, it's super bland and uninspiring. Just like Excel or
| Word. I consider it a feature.
| bitschubser_ wrote:
| In my old (and soon current again) shop we used confluence
| extensively, to get the best from both worlds we usually kept
| the documentation next to the code in markdown or asciidoc
| files and synchronized them to confluence in a CI/CD pipeline
| (confluence was read only for these sections) maybe I can open
| source these helpers when I'm back... a two way merge was also
| in the making :). we could sync whole file trees with automatic
| link crosslink generation, asset management and versioning
| support in confluence
| polote wrote:
| In my opinion this is the way to go, documentation close to
| the code but still indexed in a real knowledge management
| tool. That's one thing that we are building at Dokkument, but
| I would be really interested to know more about what you have
| done, especially how those files are then indexed on
| Confluence
| pm90 wrote:
| > It feels like most companies that use it already use the
| Atlassian stack of JIRA/Bitbucket, then feel the need to tack
| Confluence onto the end because it's there.
|
| Literally the only reason it exists. JIRA is the hook that gets
| companies on to the rest of the horrible Atlassian stack.
| kyriakos wrote:
| As if jira itself is not horrible. But to be fair to jira I
| recently tried the cloud version which is untouched by any
| scrum masters or management and its way better than what I
| have to endure in my day job with hundreds of customizations
| it has received over the years to shoehorn every kind of
| metric
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I always found the ability to draft confluence docs then create
| jira tickets from within confluence to be the 'obvious' use
| case, but I don't often see people do it. Or... I've seen some
| orgs do it a lot, and some not at all (even when they have both
| jira and confluence together).
|
| Size of org/team is probably a factor, but the linking between
| the two products is one of the few things I see it has that
| most other tools don't. It's probably because most other tools
| are single-use, and they focus on one or the other, but not
| both sides.
| polote wrote:
| > I can not fathom why anyone would use this for storing
| documentation for code etc, as opposed to storing things direct
| in a repo.
|
| Because storing documentation in repos doesn't work great when
| you want to organize your documentation, discover or search it.
|
| Having thousands of documentation files in a repo, next to the
| code is unmanageable, much more than thousands of documentation
| files in Confluence. In Confluence, you can put rights, tags,
| titles, organize in folders, assign owners, put comments, ....
|
| Is Confluence good at it ? Not much, but it doesn't mean we
| should remove Confluence.
| dont__panic wrote:
| Confluence is a fantastic way to ensure that nobody ever
| finds your documentation. The WYSIWYG editor is so painfully
| slow, buggy, and laggy, it actually reduces the chance of
| anybody bothering to update documentation. When organizations
| change names, URLs change completely and you can sometimes
| never find a linked page again after it moves. Navigation in
| confluence is painfully slow, even though it's a bunch of
| static text. Embedding code snippets or images is an exercise
| in frustration.
|
| It's a problem.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Confluence sucks! But it does have one of the best editing
| experiences I've seen (it also sucks, but less than the
| rest). You can privately draft pages before publishing
| them, get diffs of versions, it auto-saves and you even get
| real time collaboration with others. That's worth a lot,
| imo.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Agree about no one finding your documents. I have trouble
| finding my own documents in it, don't expect others to be
| able to find them. Unless you are absolutely obsessive
| about organisation and linking documents things remain a
| disjointed mess, would have been cleaner to store markdown
| in the file system in a directory tree than in confluence.
| polote wrote:
| I mean, I know. I've wrote an article called "We deserve
| better than Notion and Confluence" and I spend my days
| building an alternative to Confluence for orgz.
|
| But I still think that Confluence is better than nothing
| bbkane wrote:
| There are a couple reasons I prefer docs in Confluence to docs
| in repo: - I can update the docs without going through Git
| peer-review (admittedly this is a culture issue, not a
| technical one). - We have "code-tangential" docs already in
| Confluence and it's nice to have one place to search - Non-devs
| (like lawyers) find Confluence more familiar
|
| I've taken to putting a link to the Confluence docs in the
| README so folks who find the code first can easily find the
| docs.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > I've taken to putting a link to the Confluence docs
|
| Middle ground I've found on some projects: very detailed
| code/data-oriented notes are in markdown in the repo, tied to
| a PR. Those doc files may reference external items like
| confluence pages or specific tracking ticket/URLs that relate
| to the code at hand.
|
| I was on a team that had _everything_ in confluence, and
| everything was impossible to find. The closest I came to
| understanding it was the confluence docs were always initial
| plans, but were rarely updated. When updated, you wouldn 't
| necessarily know if you needed to look through 5 versions to
| see earlier thinking, or which links to 'updates' confluence
| pages you needed to trawl through. It was as much a problem
| of a growing set of contributors and growing departments than
| anything else, but there was a new 'direction' every 6-9
| months (when new folks would come in) and "this worked at my
| old company" so they'd document stuff however they wanted.
|
| No one on the dev team bothered to ever look there for
| anything, because it was simply pointless. Few people ever
| looked at it for anything more than "recent updates" to see
| what's changed in the last 2-3 weeks. Discoverability on the
| size of that project (and this is 'only' 5 years old ~80
| people) was just useless.
|
| A handful of folks _did_ keep 'onboarding' stuff relatively
| up to date, but it was less than a year old at that point. I
| suspect that if those folks moved on, those docs may slowly
| rot.
|
| On the whole, keep written docs both updated and useful and
| findable to a growing number of people with disparate needs
| and different contexts and backgrounds... it's a lot harder
| than it might seem when first considering it. Even if you
| have the people on a team with the aptitude for it, it's
| usually low priority in every work cycle, and the first
| casualty when trying to hit deadlines.
| ukasiu wrote:
| Even simpler Markdown-based: https://www.getoutline.com/
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| I'd say that simplicity can very much depend on audience, use-
| case and opinion. The design and content structure between
| platforms appears quite different.
|
| BookStack does support Markdown content editing although it is
| WYSIWYG or Markdown, jumping between the two isn't really
| supported (Yet, Hoping to achieve this later this year).
| pkz wrote:
| One of the benefits of Counfluence is that it is one of the
| only Wikis where I've seen non-technical people being able to
| create content on a daily basis. Linking pages, inserting
| graphs and images just works. I have yet to see that in
| anything based on markdown.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Yeah, non-technical folk were one of my key audiences for
| BookStack which most other popular open-source offerings, at
| the time, seemed to lack focus for. People do love their
| markdown input though.
|
| I'm currently rebuilding the editor; My goal is it have an
| easy WYSIWYG editor that allows instance back-and-forth
| switching to Markdown. One of the tricker parts is avoiding
| obscure/custom markdown syntax for non-common/custom content
| blocks, as one of my main principals is to ensure user
| content is portable/non-proprietary.
| tommoor wrote:
| Outline's editor is similar to Dropbox Paper, Markdown
| shortcuts work but knowing Markdown isn't a requirement to
| use it
| [deleted]
| robsalasco wrote:
| Would be nice if they can offer a managed version in the near
| future
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The whole point is that it is super easy to get going.
|
| I cut and paste the docker compose file, tweaked a few things,
| and hit the go button. Done.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Yeah, this has been requested a few times. I don't come from a
| hosting background (Outside of managing my own VPSs) so I don't
| feel it's something I can personally do (at a level of service
| I'd be happy with) but the idea of partnering with someone that
| has experience is something I've though about; The tricky part
| is finding someone I can trust enough to send users to.
| nwilkens wrote:
| I'd love to chat more about this!
|
| We're a managed cloud infrastructure business (since 2006),
| and also run our own public cloud.. Reach out to me via nick
| at mnx io.
|
| At a minimum, I'd be happy to give you some pointers in this
| space.
| satyamkapoor wrote:
| Would love to help get this up. :)
| siculars wrote:
| ^ This right here is a business ^
|
| Helping small ISVs turn their software into SaaS offerings.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| For sure. Honestly, I would love to have an established
| open-source respecting company like RedHat come along and
| say "We'll be your official hosting partner, we'll handle
| hosting, payments and offer these services, we'll need x
| hours from you per week for support, otherwise focus on the
| project, we'll give you PSx per month, You retain ownership
| and other revenue streams."
|
| A bit idealist and of course the contract would be more
| complicated, but to focus on the project while having
| established support would be ideal.
| rgj wrote:
| I sent you a message via LinkedIn, I would love to partner
| with you on this.
| davidjgraph wrote:
| I think this isn't a good strategy for the project, at a
| commercial level. They currently have a well define niche.
| Competing in a much larger market without a clear competitive
| advantage won't work.
| ecshafer wrote:
| This looks like a great piece of software. I was never a fan of
| Confluence, but that is more that Confluence, I feel is
| backwards. Since confluence, the few opinions is has, is reverse.
| You typically get some kind of set up like Confluence Space is
| owned by a person, who then adds approved editors. The default
| should be open editing, then locking down to specific people.
| What typically seems to happen in confluence shops is that
| information ends up being organized by _TEAMS_ not by topic.
| Which is a terrible way to document. This idea of Books - > Pages
| seems to be more opinionated that would hopefully get people to
| not make this mistake.
| polote wrote:
| > What typically seems to happen in confluence shops is that
| information ends up being organized by TEAMS not by topic
|
| It is usually a better idea to organize information by teams
| than topics in an organization. The reason is that if the tree
| structure is unknown to most people, they will not be able to
| find information easily nor to choose the right place to create
| information.
|
| You shouldn't expect everyone to browse the whole documentation
| to understand how it is structured in order to be able to use
| it
| Too wrote:
| Used confluence in several shops and never seen anything like
| that happen. Sounds terrible. Spaces are usually few and edit
| for all. Must have been bad admins and management.
|
| Doesn't mean it's a good product though. Especially the cloud
| version is progressively worse, especially with regards to
| performance. Glad to see some competition in the area.
| punnerud wrote:
| Should also check out MediaWiki. The last year the visual editor
| is finally included with PHP, making the installation simple:
| https://mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
| unixhero wrote:
| No not really any point in also checking out MediaWiki.
| Bookstack has surpassed MediaWiki in usability by leaps and
| bounds. They are not even comparable any more, aside from being
| able to do wiki edits they are separate use cases by now.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| A visual editor does not solve mediawiki's bloat which is
| useless for 99% of anyone who isn't Wikipedia or another large
| organization, nor MediaWiki being entirely organized around
| _pages_. Nor does it solve Mediawiki 's ugly, Web 1.0 design.
|
| In Bookstack, making the server private is one or two clicks.
| In mediawiki you have to set at least half a dozen config file
| variables.
|
| Adding any of a slew of auth methods is trivial in Bookstack.
| In mediawiki it's finding an extension, figuring out how to
| configure it, and then worrying about keeping it up to date.
|
| Bookstack is focused on "books", chapters, pages, sections -
| not "pages."
|
| It's perfect for what most people and projects need, and it
| looks fucking gorgeous out of the box to boot.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| > It's perfect for what most people and projects need, and it
| looks fucking gorgeous out of the box to boot.
|
| Thank you so much!
|
| > In mediawiki it's finding an extension, figuring out how to
| configure it, and then worrying about keeping it up to date.
|
| I've always attempted to be "batteries included" with
| BookStack due to this frustration. Means we have to be more
| limited in abilities but hopefully provide a better
| experience for what we do allow.
| bawolff wrote:
| > In Bookstack, making the server private is one or two
| clicks. In mediawiki you have to set at least half a dozen
| config file variables.
|
| This isn't really true. During install process you are asked
| which you want. If you press the private button when prompted
| you get a private wiki. If you press public you get public.
|
| If you want to change after you installed, you do have to
| edit a text based config file. You only have to edit two
| lines, but i appreciate that text based config file is a turn
| off for some people.
|
| > Bookstack is focused on "books", chapters, pages, sections
| - not "pages."
|
| I agree that this is a significant difference from mediawiki.
| You can do that sort of thing in MediaWiki, but you'll be
| swimming upstream.
|
| [Dislaimer: im a mediawiki developer]
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| This looks great! One thing which would be useful would be an
| approver role or step for document creation and updating. In a
| lot of orgs it's necessary to have someone sign off on changes to
| sop's
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