A couple more things:
First, Hallo Welt seem very interested in further developing their extension repository, which is currently in an initial stage. Ideally one should be able to switch extensions on and off from the UI and update them as well. My impression is that this will benefit all MediaWiki admins. It's a large project and they cannot take it on by themselves, but hope to get support from other interested community members.
Also, if anyone is intereted in presenting their own improvements on MW similarly, it would be great!
Mariya
On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 3:00 PM, Maria Miteva mariya.miteva@gmail.comwrote:
*Hi everybody,
Richard Heigl and Markus Glaser from Hallo Welt! presented their MediaWiki-based enterprise distribution BlueSpicehttp://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