TWiki&FOSWiki


 * Software systems / TWiki and FOSwiki**

=TWiki and FOSWiki=

The reason these two wiki systems are bracketed together is that the original developer of TWiki, Peter Thoeny, has fallen out with the majority in the developer community and so the project has undergone a fork. FOSWiki stands for ‘Free and Open Source’ …
 * []
 * []

The emphasis for TWiki and FOSWiki is on providing wiki software for the enterprise, and typical uses are in knowledge management and team collaboration. British Telecom and Motorola have used TWiki for managing technology design projects, while CMed (a pharmaceutical company) used it to manage their collection of Standard Operating Procedures and Working Practices. The data in both TWiki and FOSWiki systems is stored in flat files, with revisions managed by RCS, and the programming is in Perl.

TWiki/FOSWiki are self-described as ‘structured wikis’. Each page can have a ‘form’ attached to it as metadata, and a set of pages which share the same form builds a kind of database table which can be queried in an SQL-like manner. The data that is stored in fields on pages can then be processed and manipulated to produce reports. It appears that companies have exploited this feature to build ‘wiki applications’ for very specific tasks such as call centre status boards, sign-off sheets for compliance, inventory systems etc.
 * Although there is no database application used behind these systems, they scale well. Some corporate installations have hundreds of thousands of pages.
 * A single site may be divided into ‘webs’.
 * Fine-grained access control at site, web and page level via Access Control Lists
 * Hundreds of available plug-ins, and the ability to devise ‘wiki applications’, e.g. to write spreadsheets, interface with databases etc.
 * Graphically rich editor based on TinyMCE, reducing the need for user training
 * WebNotify system provides email notification when pages change;  also RSS/Atom feeds
 * Change management system allows users to edit the same page in parallel, and merges the changes. Where an edit conflict exists, ‘change marks’ are inserted.

Comment
Please add comments below, if you have opinions about or experience of this software system, or can point to interesting examples of its use.