Hi everybody,

Richard Heigl and Markus Glaser from Hallo Welt! presented their MediaWiki-based enterprise distribution BlueSpice 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

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