Habitat (software)

Habitat is an extremely compact content management system. It is derived from UseModWiki by Qianqian Fang. It supports a number of advanced features, such as database backends (Sqlite or MySQL), hierarchical wiki pages, user management system, page embedding, object-oriented wiki and programmable interfaces. The entire wiki is only 140kB (compressed) and can function with a single script. Habitat is a free software, and is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

What is Habitat

Habitat is a very small, super fast, easy-to-install and highly customizable content management system designed for personal or community use. Habitat is written in perl, and can use Sqlite database as the backend. It even contains a build-in CGI webserver. Habitat can be run from a local computer by an individual user, or installed on a public website serving a group of users.

Habitat is a wiki engine too. Users can quickly build their own websites or information archive using this software by creating, editing and managing wiki pages online. It provides an efficient collaborative platform for an online community to develop software or resources.

Habitat was derived from UseModWiki 1.0. It was written by Qianqian Fang who had also founded the collaborative font development project - WenQuanYi. Habitat is a result of 5 years continuous improvement of the WenQuanYi Wiki engine. A lot of new features were added, such as the user management system, database backend, hierarchical wiki page namespace, multi-language support, object-oriented structure and interfaces for plugins.

A bigger picture

Habitat is a sub-project of the Human Understandable Computing (HUC) project. The overall goal of HUC is to promote open, safe, collaborative and intuitive programming models. The focus of the project is to develop software tools that are written in non-obscured scripting languages and driven by human understandable text, graphics and multimedia data (such as voice, video or gesture). Habitat is a demonstration of the basic principles for HUC, as it is written by high-level scripting language and manipulates human understandable text information.