Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence

bookstackapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 203 posts

Re: Show HN: BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence

#91

Post by pSYoniK »

Really enjoy your project! Setting it up on a free Oracle cloud VPS is very straightforward, setting up automated backups is also very easy and restoring is again, very very easy! Thank you for your hard work on this project, it made me start working on my own take on how notes should be handled and it gave me a place to keep things that I find interesting and keep notes on everything I learned throughout uni over the past couple of years.

Thanks again, your work is really appreciated!

Re: Show HN: BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence

#92

Post by ssddanbrown »

anyfactor wrote: post #87

I haven't used Confluence or BookStack in this case. Does these platforms have git like version controlling and collaboration in them? What about login and admin stuff? Also gitbased blog platform like architecture perhaps? I am a big fan of journaling, documentation and having a knowledge hub. I am not sure what is out there for a monolithic yet shared and controllable knowledge hub.

> Does these platforms have git like version controlling and collaboration in them?

BookStack does not have git-like versioning but content changes are versioned within the database for rollback/compare/viewing.

> What about login and admin stuff?

BookStack has multiple authentication options (Including email & password/LDAP/OIDC/SAML2) in addition to admin/user/role controls.

Re: Show HN: BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence

#93

Post by ei8ths »

one of the things we use confluence for is tagging people to tasks. putting pages underneath pages and when things are checked off they show up on the parent page so employees have all tasks and then the meeting tasks, then plus all the wiki features but the above was what sold us on confluence for doing meetings and minutes. I haven't been able to find something similar.

Re: Show HN: BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence

#94

Post by IceWreck »

I used to use Dokuwiki as my personal notes app/knowledgebase pretty heavily. Switched to Bookstack two years ago and never looked back. It has everything you need in a Wiki, no third party plugins needed like Dokuwiki.

The API is excellent, and I've used it to build some custom stuff. They recently added webhooks too.

And Dan is pretty responsive on Discord if you need help.

Re: Show HN: BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence

#96

Post by KennyBlanken »

punnerud wrote: post #82

Should also check out MediaWiki. The last year the visual editor is finally included with PHP, making the installation simple: https://mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

A visual editor does not solve mediawiki's bloat which is useless for 99% of anyone who isn't Wikipedia or another large organization, nor MediaWiki being entirely organized around pages. Nor does it solve Mediawiki's ugly, Web 1.0 design.

In Bookstack, making the server private is one or two clicks. In mediawiki you have to set at least half a dozen config file variables.

Adding any of a slew of auth methods is trivial in Bookstack. In mediawiki it's finding an extension, figuring out how to configure it, and then worrying about keeping it up to date.

Bookstack is focused on "books", chapters, pages, sections - not "pages."

It's perfect for what most people and projects need, and it looks fucking gorgeous out of the box to boot.

Re: Show HN: BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence

#97

Post by ssddanbrown »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #89

This looks really nice. Atlassian did not consider small businesses with regulatory requirements when it decided to push everyone to the cloud. Atlassian's cloud cannot ever meet my regulatory requirements, by 2024 I need to replace Confluence. There is no way I can pay for the cost of the Data Center version of Confluence you'll be able to self-host, over $20K/year to self-host Confluence is a non-starter. Does Book…

> Does BookStack index uploaded files for search? If so, what formats does it support?

No, unfortunately not. You can attach files but we only support indexing (And parsing) of core page content. Indexing other formats opens up a large branch of maintenance while adding potential confusion in the platform in regards to what's considered content.

> Can pages (or books) be exported in common formats?

Yeah, Both can be exported as plaintext, markdown, contained-html or PDF. The PDF export can be troublesome but works for most simple use-cases.

> Any plans to support Postgres in the future?

Not in sight for the near future. I'm not closed off to it but there are questions of support and maintainership. My detailed thoughts on additional database support can be found here: https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/issues/76#issuecom...

Re: Show HN: BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence

#98

Post by KennyBlanken »

throw0101a wrote: post #43

Can anyone with experience with multiple wiki platforms compare this with XWiki and/or MediaWiki. I may be asked to update $WORK's wiki, which is currently MoinMoin (IIRC), and am looking for anyone with more experience so I don't have to start testing from scratch. I've run MediaWiki before, but am not beholden to using it just because of past/current familiarity. Importing from MoinMoin would be nice, but not absol…

Mediawiki is page focused, needing a lot of tweaking to make it act like something other than a completely open public page editor. Trying to collect pages is annoying ugly; about the best you can do is with "categories." Mediawiki tries to do too much with document metatags and whatnot. Mediawiki is ugly/outdated looking (IMHO) and requires lots of php config file editing.

Bookstack has a lot more inherent document organization stuff (ie: books>chapters>pages etc), it's easy as hell to administer, and it looks gorgeous out of the box.

Re: Show HN: BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence

#99

Post by budafish »

Some time ago I was trying to transition to platform to help me capture my own personal notes and organise my knowledge. BookStack was a good front runner, but I think the lack of mobile editing along with the hassle of upgrades made me end up using Notion.

Now by all means notion isn't perfect at all, but for me who just wanted to start writing notes it seems the right choice at the time.

I would like to switch to BookStack as it looks great and is a great product, but the one issue that worries me is when it comes to upgrades and migrations. Generally I found when upgrading database based platforms I end up messing up hugely causing myself a huge headache, and then eventually not upgrading at all. For example I used Monica CRM, and totally botched the upgrades eventually just closing it down and using Google contacts instead.

If there was an easy way to solve for that I'd definitely be on board with self-hosting it myself. But at the moment I just don't have the time to resolve upgrade issues :(

Re: Show HN: BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence

#100

Post by ssddanbrown »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #95

I've been planning on rolling this out at work for months now, just finished setting up a little server for the office to host it on. Its going to help so much.

That's great, hope it works out well for you!
Post reply on HN