Foswiki

Foswiki is a structured wiki, typically used to run a collaboration platform, knowledge or document management system, a knowledge base, or team portal. Users can create wiki applications using the Topic Markup Language, and developers can extend its functionality with plugins.
The Foswiki project was forked from the TWiki project by the bulk of the
active development community after TWiki.net assumed direct control of the TWiki project and requested that all contributors agree to a new code of conduct before being allowed to continue working on the project.
Major features
* Revision control - complete audit trail, also for meta data such as attachments and access control settings
* Fine-grained access control - restrict read/write/rename on site level, web level, page level based on user groups
* Extensible topic markup language
* TinyMCE based WYSIWYG editor
* Dynamic content generation with macros
* Forms and reporting - capture structured content, report on it with searches embedded in pages
* Built in database - users can create wiki applications using the Topic Markup Language
* Skinnable user interface
* RSS/Atom feeds and e-mail notification
* Over 400 Extensions and 200 Plugins
Extensions
Foswiki has a plugin API that has over 100 maintained extensions and ability to run additionally about 300 historical TWiki plugins at various levels of maintenance through a compatibility plugin.
These extensions link into databases, create charts, tags, sort tables, write spreadsheets, create image gallery and slideshows, make drawings, write blogs, plot graphs, interface to many different authentication schemes, track Extreme Programming projects and so on.
Foswiki application platform
Foswiki as a structured wiki provides database-like manipulation of fields stored on pages,
and offers a SQL-like query language to embed reports in wiki pages.
Wiki applications are also called situational applications because they are created ad-hoc by the users for very specific needs. Users have built Foswiki applications that include call center status boards, to-do lists, inventory systems, employee handbooks, bug trackers, blog applications, discussion forums, status reports with rollups and more.
User interface
The interface of Foswiki is completely skinnable in templates, themes and (per user) CSS. It includes support for internationalization ('I18N'), with support for multiple character sets, UTF-8 URLs, and the user interface has been translated into Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish
.
Foswiki deployment
Foswiki is expected to be used primarily at the workplace as a corporate wiki to coordinate team activities, track projects, implement workflows and as an Intranet Wiki.
Realization
Foswiki is implemented in Perl. Wiki pages are stored in plain text files. Everything, including meta such as access control settings, are version controlled using RCS. RCS is optional since an all-Perl version control system is provided.
Foswiki scales reasonably well even though it uses plain text files and no relational database to store page data. Load balancing and caching can be used to improve performance on high traffic sites. The TWiki product, upon which Foswiki is based, is used in many corporate installations with several hundred thousand pages and tens of thousands of users.
Foswiki has database features built into the engine. A form<ref name="Foswiki-why"/>
The IRC logs of the meeting which led up to this event show that there were two main issues.
* Peter Thoeny had changed the access rights to the TWiki.org wiki, locking everyone out from the site unless they agreed to sign up to new terms and conditions.
* The trademarks to the TWiki name were held by Peter Thoeny who was not willing to license them (on a perpetual basis) to the community.
 
< Prev   Next >