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

bookstackapp.com

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

#121

Post by davidjgraph »

ssddanbrown wrote: post #117
zekenie wrote: post #104

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

This is something that has been requested before, although not something I'd probably look to include in the core project since I attempt to avoid custom formats and syntax where possible. That said, I'd like to get to a point where something like mermaid.js can easily be added if desired. Over the last year the BookStack platform extensibility has grow significantly (API, Webhooks, PHP Hooks, View/Language/Icon Over…

In diagram under Arrange->Insert->Advanced (obviously).

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

#122

Post by polote »

emptysongglass wrote: post #101
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…

> Confluence is terrible in all kinds of other ways.

I disagree, Confluence is used by tens of thousands of organizations and they don't have a very good Sales strategy, that means a lot of business choose them when they could have choose something else. So I can't buy that it is terrible everywhere.

Can we do better ? Hell yeah. But I agree with you that most of Confluence competitors are in the SMB space even though money is in large enterprise. (But that's why we are building Dokkument)

That's not wikis that are bad at evergreen notes, that's evergreen notes that are not suitable for sharing with teams. Athens or Roam research, or others works well for one person, but can't work for teams.

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

#123

Post by ulnarkressty »

ssddanbrown wrote: post #70
ulnarkressty wrote: post #65

Had a look around, this looks really polished. I would have one remark - please consider making tables a first-class feature. In my experience with Confluence, the easiest and most comprehensive way to organize information is with tables. Having a quick way to merge, delete, color cells would be great. Right now, coloring and merging are hidden away in some menus, and deleting cells will shift the bottom toolbar with…

Yeah, Tables are a challenge in general. The trouble with them from an editor perspective is the range of desired options and control (Many each at table, row, cell level) is fairly vast. I'm currently in the process of building a new content editor which I'm hoping would provide better opportunities to make such controls more intuitive.

It doesn't need to be Word or Excel-levels of options and control, less is actually more - for example table cells in Confluence can only have 6 colors, and no fancy border styles etc. which in my opinion provides a more unified look and feel. Just the UX needs to flow smoothly enough, as working with tabular data consists of doing many of the same steps over and over again.

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

#124

Post by satyamkapoor »

ssddanbrown wrote: post #40
robsalasco wrote: post #24

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

Yeah, this has been requested a few times. I don't come from a hosting background (Outside of managing my own VPSs) so I don't feel it's something I can personally do (at a level of service I'd be happy with) but the idea of partnering with someone that has experience is something I've though about; The tricky part is finding someone I can trust enough to send users to.

Would love to help get this up. :)

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

#125

Post by polote »

Sheen96 wrote: post #112

Glad to see any alternatives to confluence (or Atlassian in general). I've used Confluence for a good 4 years or so and for the life of me, I can not fathom why anyone would use this for storing documentation for code etc, as opposed to storing things direct in a repo. I can understand it's use somewhat for business folks, but even then, the way of organising things is abysmal, every solution (such as rich text editi…

> I can not fathom why anyone would use this for storing documentation for code etc, as opposed to storing things direct in a repo.

Because storing documentation in repos doesn't work great when you want to organize your documentation, discover or search it.

Having thousands of documentation files in a repo, next to the code is unmanageable, much more than thousands of documentation files in Confluence. In Confluence, you can put rights, tags, titles, organize in folders, assign owners, put comments, ....

Is Confluence good at it ? Not much, but it doesn't mean we should remove Confluence.

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

#126

Post by ssddanbrown »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #102
tin7in wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

I agree that it's frustrating when a company hides their product, but I think the saga website design is really nice and they do have an actual video of the platform front and center (Instead of one of those fake simplified "representations" that may companies use).

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

#127

Post by polote »

ecshafer wrote: post #72

This looks like a great piece of software. I was never a fan of Confluence, but that is more that Confluence, I feel is backwards. Since confluence, the few opinions is has, is reverse. You typically get some kind of set up like Confluence Space is owned by a person, who then adds approved editors. The default should be open editing, then locking down to specific people. What typically seems to happen in confluence s…

> What typically seems to happen in confluence shops is that information ends up being organized by TEAMS not by topic

It is usually a better idea to organize information by teams than topics in an organization. The reason is that if the tree structure is unknown to most people, they will not be able to find information easily nor to choose the right place to create information.

You shouldn't expect everyone to browse the whole documentation to understand how it is structured in order to be able to use it

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

#128

Post by Too »

ecshafer wrote: post #72

This looks like a great piece of software. I was never a fan of Confluence, but that is more that Confluence, I feel is backwards. Since confluence, the few opinions is has, is reverse. You typically get some kind of set up like Confluence Space is owned by a person, who then adds approved editors. The default should be open editing, then locking down to specific people. What typically seems to happen in confluence s…

Used confluence in several shops and never seen anything like that happen. Sounds terrible. Spaces are usually few and edit for all. Must have been bad admins and management.

Doesn’t mean it’s a good product though. Especially the cloud version is progressively worse, especially with regards to performance. Glad to see some competition in the area.

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

#130

Post by dont__panic »

polote wrote: post #125
Sheen96 wrote: post #112

Glad to see any alternatives to confluence (or Atlassian in general). I've used Confluence for a good 4 years or so and for the life of me, I can not fathom why anyone would use this for storing documentation for code etc, as opposed to storing things direct in a repo. I can understand it's use somewhat for business folks, but even then, the way of organising things is abysmal, every solution (such as rich text editi…

> I can not fathom why anyone would use this for storing documentation for code etc, as opposed to storing things direct in a repo. Because storing documentation in repos doesn't work great when you want to organize your documentation, discover or search it. Having thousands of documentation files in a repo, next to the code is unmanageable, much more than thousands of documentation files in Confluence. In Confluence…

Confluence is a fantastic way to ensure that nobody ever finds your documentation. The WYSIWYG editor is so painfully slow, buggy, and laggy, it actually reduces the chance of anybody bothering to update documentation. When organizations change names, URLs change completely and you can sometimes never find a linked page again after it moves. Navigation in confluence is painfully slow, even though it's a bunch of static text. Embedding code snippets or images is an exercise in frustration.

It's a problem.

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