Show HN: BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by emptysongglass » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

polote wrote: post #47

Maybe BookStack can do fine for a company with a few dozens of employees. But Confluence can handle tens of thousands of employees. So I wouldn't label Bookstack as a Confluence alternative. Maybe I'm missing something, but BookStack doesn't even have a notion of "teams" only roles. You can't give permission of a file to a user, only to all users who have a certain role. But I'm certainly biased as I'm building a rea…

Confluence is terrible in all kinds of other ways. To be frank, it's the worst company documentation software I've ever used. Discoverability is terrible and it's easy to end up in a situation with thousands of pages that quickly fall out of maintenance because features for organization are an after thought. Its own markup is terrible and its Markdown import support similarly so.

Most wikis are terrible at evergreen notes: the only one I can think of that might be moving the ball forward is Athens Research though I wasn't able to get their self-hosted beta running and I host dozens of other services with Compose.

Obsidian might be good too, but they don't seem too keen on supporting large business collab usecases even though enterprise is a cashcow.

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

#102

Post by KennyBlanken » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

tin7in wrote: post #73

polote wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All real Confluence alternative (Confluence is a b2b software not a wiki tool) Notion, Guru, Slab, Slite ... are supporting that since their creation.

As someone else pointed out, creating a good real time editing experience is tricky, especially if the editor is block based. I would add Saga ( https://saga.so ) to the list of alternatives.

It is extremely offputting that Saga doesn't show a single actual product view, the site design makes me think the product is equally ugly, and they require signing up to see a demo?

When a company hides the product that much and forces you to only experience it with a tour guide, it's tacit admission the product sucks.

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

#103

Post by unixhero » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

Great software. Use it a lot. Just wish it had backup and restore within the web interface.

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

#104

Post by zekenie » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

It'd be awesome if this thing had mermaidjs support. It's native in obsidian and it's such a game changer

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

#105

Post by ssddanbrown » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

pSYoniK wrote: post #91

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 th…

Thanks! Interesting to hear about the backups and restore being easy, I often hear complaints due to not having in-app backup/restore but the risk of causing issues, over doing that at an infrastructure level (Via mysqldump/file-copies), has always been a point of worry for me when thinking down the in-app route.

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

#106

Post by KennyBlanken » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

robsalasco wrote: post #24

Would be nice if they can offer a managed version in the near future

The whole point is that it is super easy to get going.

I cut and paste the docker compose file, tweaked a few things, and hit the go button. Done.

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

#107

Post by ssddanbrown » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 5:23 PM UTC

IceWreck wrote: post #94

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.

Thanks for the kind words! Always nice to hear happy feedback regarding the API, good to know it's getting some use.

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

#108

Post by unixhero » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

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

No not really any point in also checking out MediaWiki. Bookstack has surpassed MediaWiki in usability by leaps and bounds. They are not even comparable any more, aside from being able to do wiki edits they are separate use cases by now.

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

#109

Post by tough » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

ssddanbrown wrote: post #59

maineldc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I use started using bookstack when I realized that I wanted a place for long form / long term storage of documents separates from my Notes / To dos. I love it and I deeply appreciate your hard work. For others that haven't tried it, here's what clicked for me: - An opinionated hierarchy of Book -> Chapter (Optional) -> Page - Great search - WYSIWYG OR Markdown supported - Great integr…

Thank you! I love to hear about the specific features people enjoy. > WYSIWYG OR Markdown I will state that switching between them is pretty flaky at the moment, is done at instance level and can cause HTML in markdown. Is designed to be choose-once-and-leave. That said, in rebuilding the editor I am aiming for easy and instant Markdown & WYSIWYG switching within editor.

outline has a nice rich-markdown-text-editor package for react based apps in case you can re-use it!

I looked into the LaTeX support of it for a science editor projectg

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

#110

Post by ssddanbrown » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #103

Great software. Use it a lot. Just wish it had backup and restore within the web interface.

If it only had backup within the interface, would that cover most of your wish?

Reason being, I always have troubling thinking about backup AND restore, but mostly because restore is a complicated mess (Especially when you start thinking about going across versions). Just achieving backup within the interface (Of database and uploaded files) is much more feasible.