CMS

Outline: An Open-source modern Wiki engine for teams and communities

Hazem Abbas

Nov 8, 2021 — 2 min read

The Outline app is a free self-hosted wiki engine and collaborative knowledge base for teams.

Wiki engines are built to ease collaborative content creation for teams, organizations, and communities. However, many current open-source wiki engines are old, Outline and some others are new modern recreation of the experience for professional teams and enterprises.

Outline comes with a fancy clean interface (A productivity booster usable interface) which increases productivity.

It has dozens of features to improve collaborative writing and editing among large teams.

The system is written with Node.js and uses React. It can be installed using Docker for development and/ or production.

Outline features a rich editor which supports Markdown and comes with slash commands

Features

Clean eye-candy user interface (UI)
Multi-user collaborative features
hierarchical data structure
Full-text search: searches posts, drafts, archives, trash, and collections.
Templates manager: allows the editor to create and re-use writing templates.
Drafts, archive, and revision support
Collection management is a handy feature to organize books, documentations, and manuals.
Rich editor with a dozen of shortcuts and quick access key
Slash commands, which work like quick access to dozens of editor feature just by typing /.
Rich embeds with multimedia support: the app allows embedding rich media like YouTube videos, GitHub Gist code snippets, and SoundCloud audio.
The automatic dark mode changes the system style according to your operating system mode.
Automatic backlink creation and building: with this feature, editors do not need to worry about internal linking between pages, sections, and collections. It also helps to export well-connected manuals and documentation.
Rich integrations: Outline offers out-of-the-box integration with many services like Slack, Figma, Google Docs, Zapier, and Airtable.
Custom integration through a rich API.
Multiple language support: Currently, Outline supports 13 languages, which include: English, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean, and more.
RTL “Right-to-Left” languages support: Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew.
Highly customizable styles
Docker support: With Docker set up, the system does not take much to be installed in any Docker supported system
Built-in Slack support: Slack is the preferable messaging app for many teams, Outline Integration ensures a productivity boost, seamless communications, and productive discussions.