TWiki

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the robot character, see Twiki.

TWiki

Developed by	Peter Thoeny with TWiki contributors
Initial release	23 Jul 1998
Stable release	4.2.0 (January 22, 2008) _[+/−]
Preview release	None (None) _[+/−]
Written in	Perl
OS	Cross-platform
Genre	Wiki
License	GPL
Website	twiki.org

TWiki is a structured wiki, typically used to run a collaboration platform, knowledge or document management system, a knowledge base, or team portal. Users can create wiki applications using the TWiki Markup Language, and developers can extend its functionality with plugins.

1 Major features
2 TWiki extensions
3 TWiki application platform
4 User interface
5 TWiki deployment
6 Realization
7 History
8 Gallery
9 Footnotes
10 See also
11 External links

[edit] Major features

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 TWiki markup language
TinyMCE based WYSIWYG editor
Dynamic content generation with TWiki variables
Forms and reporting - capture structured content, report on it with searches embedded in pages
Built in database - users can create wiki applications using the TWiki Markup Language
Skinneable user interface
RSS/Atom feeds and e-mail notification
Hundreds of plugins

[edit] TWiki extensions

TWiki has a plugin API that has spawned over 400 extensions^[1] to link into databases, create charts, tags, sort tables, write spreadsheets, create image gallery and slideshows, make drawings, write blogs, plot all kinds of graphs, interface to many different authentication schemes, track Extreme Programming projects and so on.

[edit] TWiki application platform

TWiki as a structured wiki provides database-like manipulation of fields stored on pages^[2], and offers a SQL-like query language to embed reports in wiki pages.^[3]

Wiki applications are also called situational applications because they are created ad-hoc by the users for very specific needs. Users have built TWiki applications^[4] that include call center status boards, to-do lists, inventory systems, employee handbooks, bug trackers, blog applications, discussion forums, status reports with rollups and more.

[edit] User interface

TWiki is fully skinnable in templates, themes and (per user) CSS. It includes support for internationalization ('I18N'), with support for multiple character sets, UTF-8 URLs, and the user interface has been translated into Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish ^[5].

[edit] TWiki deployment

TWiki is primarily used at the workplace as a corporate wiki^[6] to coordinate team activities, to track projects and as an Intranet Wiki. The TWiki community estimates 40,000 corporate wiki sites as of March 2007, and 20,000 public TWiki sites^[7].

TWiki customers include Fortune 500 such as Nokia, Motorola, Yahoo!, and DHL, as well as small and medium enterprises^[8].

[edit] Realization

TWiki is implemented in Perl. Wiki pages are stored in plain text files. Everything, including meta such as access control settings, are version controlled using RCS. RCS is optional since an all-Perl version control system is provided.

TWiki scales reasonably well even though it uses plain text files and no relational database to store page data. Many corporate TWiki installations have several hundred thousand pages and tens of thousands of users^[9]. Load balancing and caching can be used to improve performance on high traffic sites.

TWiki has database features built into the engine. A TWiki Form^[10] is attached to a page as meta data. This represents a database record. A set of pages that share the same type of form build a database table. A formatted search^[11] with a SQL-like query^[12] can be embedded into a page to construct dynamic presentation of data from multiple pages. This allows for building wiki applications and constitutes the TWiki's notion of a structured wiki.