BlueSpice MediaWiki (BlueSpice for short) is free wiki 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 MediaWik ...

engine and licensed with the GNU General Public License. It is especially developed for businesses as an

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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. 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

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. 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) offers improved search functionalities, like

faceted search Faceted search is a technique that involves augmenting traditional search techniques with a faceted navigation system, allowing users to narrow down search results by applying multiple filters based on faceted classification of the items. It is so ...

. 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, groups, rights and settings.

Technology

BlueSpice is written in the PHP programming language and uses MySQL,

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/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 u ...

license.

Versions

References

External links

Official website
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