BlueSpice MediaWiki (BlueSpice for short) is free

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

software based on the

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki ...

engine and licensed with the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

. It is especially developed for businesses as an

enterprise wiki Enterprise (or the archaic spelling Enterprize) may refer to: Business and economics Brands and enterprises * Enterprise GP Holdings, an energy holding company * Enterprise plc, a UK civil engineering and maintenance company * Enterprise ...

distribution for MediaWiki and used in over 150 countries.

History

The German company Hallo Welt! has been developing the open source wiki software BlueSpice since 2007. The project was originally initiated as "bluepedia" by IBM, who wanted to deploy MediaWiki but were unable to live with its downsides. In 2011, Hallo Welt! decided to publish their wiki as free and

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

software. The stable version of BlueSpice for MediaWiki was released July 4, 2011. From this point on, a free download has been available at

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrorin ...

. The first release of BlueSpice was a couple of extensions and has developed into a complete stand-alone distribution which has the latest MediaWiki as a core system but offers in the free version more than 50 distinct extensions and a completely different user interface. According to independent sources, the BlueSpice free distribution is one of the most popular wiki software for knowledge management in organisations. In Autumn 2013, Hallo Welt! released the completely reworked version BlueSpice 2. According to the BlueSpice developers this release aims for opening up BlueSpice for freelance developers in the global MediaWiki community and multiple language versions. In 2014, BlueSpice for MediaWiki became a project of

Translatewiki.net translatewiki.net, formerly named Betawiki, is a web-based translation platform powered by the Translate extension for MediaWiki. It can be used to translate various kinds of texts but is commonly used for creating localisations for software ...

. In January 2015 the developers announced that they will change to a subscription model.

Functionality

Some central features of BlueSpice are: *Visual editing: allowing editing without any knowledge of wiki code (WYSIWYG). *Search and navigation: An extended search (

Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java and is dual-l ...

) offers improved search functionalities, like

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. The search results can further be sorted or filtered by category, namespace, author, semantic data, data type etc. Any files attached are also searched. It also provides common features like

autocomplete Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical user interfaces, users can typically press the tab ...

and search as you type. *Quality assurance and review tools (workflow tool, reminder e.a.): Pages for instance can be assigned to a reviewer. This allows articles to be reviewed and approved. *Book function: Individual articles can be grouped into article collections to create manuals, documentations or instructions with chapter navigation. The books can be exported with it in different formats (PDF, DOCX) together with the respective file attachments. *Meta data and semantic: analyze and work with meta data. *Communication: Additional discussion and blog functionalities, a timeline and notification system support editorial processes. *Administration: Convenient management of users,

namespaces In computing, a namespace is a set of signs (''names'') that are used to identify and refer to objects of various kinds. A namespace ensures that all of a given set of objects have unique names so that they can be easily identified. Namespaces ...

, groups, rights and settings.

Technology

BlueSpice is written in the

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

programming language and uses

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

Apache The Apache () are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Mimbreño, Ndendahe (Bedonkohe or Mogollon and Nednhi or Carrizaleño an ...

/IIS,

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(optional). The editions can be installed on top of an existing MediaWiki installation or as a standalone installation that includes MediaWiki. The distribution is a collection of extensions, which can be extended with user-specific features or skins. While every single extension can be deactivated, BlueSpice editions integrate and standardize extensions to improve the user experience and maintenance.

Licensing

According to the MediaWiki standard all extensions are published under the

GPLv3 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

license.

Versions

References

External links

Official website
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