Wiki

Foswiki: Open-source Wiki Engine for Teams, Communities, and Enterprise

Hazem Abbas

Aug 23, 2023 — 3 min read

Foswiki is a powerful Enterprise wiki solution that offers a wide range of features which are designed to help you create, organize, and share your company's knowledge. With its fine-grained access control, Foswiki allows you to easily manage user permissions and ensure that only authorized personnel can view, edit, or delete content. Additionally, with revision control, you can keep track of changes made to each page and easily revert to previous versions if needed.

One of the most notable features of Foswiki is its forms and reporting capabilities. With this feature, you can easily create custom forms and templates to collect data from users and store it in a built-in database. This makes it easy to organize and analyze the information, and generate reports based on the data collected.

Foswiki is highly flexible and can be easily customized to suit your specific needs. With over 400 extensions and 200 plugins available, you can easily add new features and functionality to your wiki site. Additionally, Foswiki runs on standard web servers, making it easy to install and manage.

Features

Runs on standard web servers, such as Apache and NGINX
Runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows (even stand alone on a USB Stick), also available as easy-to-setup software appliance for VMware or VirtualBox
Wiki application development leveraging the Data Wiki and Macro language functionality to allow collaborative data based applications
Localized interfaces in 20 languages
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 topic markup language
TinyMCE based WYSIWYG editor
Dynamic content generation with macros
Forms and reporting - capture structured content, report on it with searches embedded in pages
Enterprise LDAP support
Modern architecture that supports fastcgi, modperl, httpd stand alone and load balancing
Built in database - users can create wiki applications using the Topic Markup Language
Skinnable user interface
Free, friendly, and effective community-based support by a community dedicated to democracy
RSS/Atom feeds and e-mail notification
Compatible with TWiki, including a seamless migration path
Over 400 Extensions and 200 Plugins

Foswiki is a structured data platform

It enables you to:

Store data in pages
Use advanced search to extract data
Create applications: status boards, to-do lists, inventory systems, employee handbooks, bug trackers

Foswiki is a programmable pages platform

Users can create applications using Excel-like macros - built-in or from numerous extensions
Extract and display data in different formats: tabular, graphical, XML
Combine with Web APIs like Google Maps to create mashups