BlueSpice is free

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

software based on the

MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...

engine and licensed with the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. 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. The freely available version BlueSpice free is considered one of the most popular wiki computer programs for knowledge management in companies.

History

The German company Hallo Welt! has been working on the development of an open source wiki based on MediaWiki since 2007. The origins of the later BlueSpice software go back to an initiative by the IBM CTO Gunter Dueck, who initiated an internal company wiki for IBM Germany in 2007 under the name "bluepedia". The model for the bluepedia project was Wikipedia and accordingly the platform was based on MediaWiki. However, in daily operation, additional requirements arose for the software used. This led to the founding of a company that would develop and provide the missing functions in the future. 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 and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

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 founded by Geoffrey B. Jeffery, Tim Perdue, and Drew Streib in November 1999. SourceForge provides a centralized software discovery platform, including an online platform for managing and hosting open-source soft ...

. A key feature of the software was the provision of a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for what you see is what you get, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

editor, which at the time was based on the TinyMCE editor. 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. In January 2015 the developers announced that they will change to a subscription model.

Functionality and technology

BlueSpice is written in the

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards 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 software, 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 rel ...

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

/IIS, Tomcat. BlueSpice is released in a free edition and two paid editions. The free edition adds more than 50 extensions to a MediaWiki, mainly in the areas of: *Editing: A version of the MediaWiki VisualEditor is delivered, which, unlike the original, contains additional functions, such as an easier procedure for uploading documents or inserting dynamic content. The creation of new pages is supported by page templates. *Search and navigation: An extended search (

Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is a Search engine (computing), search engine based on Apache Lucene, a free and open-source search engine. It provides a distributed, Multitenancy, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema ...

) offers improved search functionalities, like

faceted search Faceted search augments lexical search with a faceted navigation system, allowing users to narrow results by applying filters based on a faceted classification of the items. It is a parametric search technique. A faceted classification system clas ...

. 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 software, application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android (operating system), Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical us ...

and search as you type. *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.

Licensing and distribution

All extensions of the BlueSpice distributions are under open source licenses. The functions written by Hallo Welt! are published under the license

GPLv3 The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. The free version is made available for download as a classic server installation in a tarball or as a Docker image, with BlueSpice free having the widest distribution via the official Docker version (with more than 1 million pulls in three years).

Versions

References

External links