TWiki

TWiki 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 TWiki Markup Language, and developers can extend its functionality with plugins.

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 TWiki markup language
• TinyMCE based WYSIWYG editor
• Dynamic content generation with TWiki variables
• Forms and reporting - capture structured content, report on it with searches embedded in pages
• Built in database - users can create wiki applications using the TWiki Markup Language
• Skinneable user interface
• RSS/Atom feeds and e-mail notification
• Hundreds of plugins

TWiki extensions

TWiki has a plugin API that has spawned over 400 extensions^[1] to link into databases, create charts, tags, sort tables, write spreadsheets, create image gallery and slideshows, make drawings, write blogs, plot all kinds of graphs, interface to many different authentication schemes, track Extreme Programming projects and so on.

TWiki application platform

TWiki as a structured wiki provides database-like manipulation of fields stored on pages^[2], and offers a SQL-like query language to embed reports in wiki pages.^[3]

Wiki applications are also called situational applications because they are created ad-hoc by the users for very specific needs. Users have built TWiki applications^[4] 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

TWiki is fully 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 ^[5].

TWiki deployment

TWiki is primarily used at the workplace as a corporate wiki^[6] to coordinate team activities, to track projects and as an Intranet Wiki. The TWiki community estimates 40,000 corporate wiki sites as of March 2007, and 20,000 public TWiki sites^[7].

TWiki customers include Fortune 500 such as Nokia, Motorola, Yahoo!, and DHL, as well as small and medium enterprises^[8].

Realization

TWiki is implemented in Perl. RCS and GNU diff for revision control are optional, since an all-Perl equivalent is provided.

Wiki pages are (by default) stored in plain text files and are searched with regular expressions using GNU grep. This, given the strict syntax of tables, allows for searching the table structures, akin to querying a table in a relational database. Searching the names of pages is also possible. By putting a search expression in a wiki page, one can select other pages or data from tables, thus constructing dynamic presentation of data from multiple pages. Mathematical operations on selected data can be performed in a spreadsheet-like manner using a plugin.

When creating/editing a page, one can attach a table-structured data with predefined fields by using a "form" (which is defined in advance and possibly attached to new pages via a template). Combined with the feature of searching tables in pages, described earlier, this allows for building wiki applications and constitutes the TWiki's notion of a structured wiki.

History

• 23 Jul 1998 Initial version, based on JosWiki
• 01-May-2000 TWiki Release
• 01-Dec-2000 TWiki Release
• 01-Sep-2001 TWiki Release
• 01-Dec-2001 TWiki Release ("Athens")
• 01-Feb-2003 TWiki Release ("Beijing")
• 04-Sep-2004 TWiki Release ("Cairo")
• 24 Oct 2006 TWiki 4.0.5 ("Dakar")
• 03 Mar 2007 TWiki 4.1.2 ("Edinburgh")
• 22 Jan 2008 TWiki 4.2.0 ("Freetown")

Gallery

Footnotes

1. ^ TWiki.org extension repository
2. ^ TWiki Forms
3. ^ SEARCH variable, formatted search, SQL-like query search
4. ^ Sample TWiki applications
5. ^ TWiki Contributors. User Interface Localisation. twiki.org. Retrieved on 2008-03-01.
6. ^ Paper on corporate wiki users (slides)
7. ^ Estimated number of TWiki installations
8. ^ What do TWiki users say?

See also

• Comparison of wiki software

External links

• Official TWiki site
• TWIKI.NET - company providing commercial installation and support for TWiki
• WikiRing - network of wiki consultantsda:TWiki

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