*Hi everybody,
Richard Heigl and Markus Glaser from Hallo Welt! presented their
MediaWiki-based enterprise distribution
BlueSpice<http://www.blue-spice.org/>yesterday. Around 6-7 people
attended the online meeting, but I believe
some of those who were unable to will be interested in the cool features
Richard and Markus showed us, so I am sharing a summary below. Please read
on :)
BlueSpice was developed over the last 6 years. It is installed on top of
vanilla MediaWiki and offers a bundle of extensions, some MediaWiki-native
and some proprietary to BlueSpice. Customers get assurance of the
compatibility of the bundle with given MediaWiki versions as well as a
roadmap of future releases. The basic BlueSpice distribution comes for
free, while support, training, special packages, etc. are paid for.
Hallo Welt! are planning to move to Git in the next few months and open up
BlueSpice to the MediaWiki community. The code is currently available for
anyone to look at and reuse. However, If you want to submit a patch, you
have to email them. This will change soon. Also, documentation in English
is limited but they are working on translating all materials/docs/demos in
the next several months.
BlueSpice offers the following features catering to the enterprise user :
WYSIWYG editor
- might be replaced by VisualEditor soon but was a major advantage of
BlueSpice so far
- easy creation of tables
- easy upload of photos and files
- interface for insertion of magic words
- easy insertions of links within the wiki with a drop down menu of
articles
- still need to use wikicode a little
Improved search
- advanced options
- filter (by namespace, etc.)
- suggestions as you type
- search file names
Advanced administration panel
- user management
- manage email, rights, passwords
- connects to LDAP, allows single signon
- extensions management for BlueSpice extensions
- list of extensions with status (stable, beta)
- automatic testing of extensions
- in the next release it will show you when a newer version of an
extension exists and what kind of update it is (security, feature)
- in the future they hope to have a common repository for BlueSpice
and other MediaWiki extensions with the ability to switch
extensions on/off
and update from the UI
- permission manager - assign permissions to users
- namespace manager - no need to touch the config files
- add, edit properties
- merge namespaces
- delete namespaces and backup pages in them
PDF export
- you can organize your contents in a hierarchical navigation menu (like
a book with chapters and articles) and you can export a chapter as pdf (
soon openoffice and Word doc as well )
- you export to predefined templates
- you get all linked attachments in the pdf as well
- excellent for creating up-to-date manuals and technical documentation
with a click
Improved navigation
- status bar on top of article - last updated, by whom, responsible
editor
- every user has a personal navigation bar depending on his preferences
Article feedback
- you can assign responsible editors for articles
- article review tool - you can ask certain people to review a draft
article, define a review period, etc.
Statistics
- improved statistics with visualization, diagrams, etc.
- you can look at history of searchers with counts
- RSS feeds
Skins
- they offer a few skins but want to improve on that
SMW + BlueSpice?
- theere are several examples that use both and it works without
conflicts
- there are some conflicts in terms of user experience (Semantic Forms
vs BlueSpice editor) but no conflicts
- there is no integration between the two yet, even though there is
potential for that
Release Cycle
- once or twice a year - releases - patch releases more often
- trying to follow MW release cycle since download rate went up 3 times
as they released a version supporting newer MW versions recently
Richard and Markus can correct me or add more detail. For technical
details, ask Markus Glaser.
Mariya
*
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