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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

#181

Post by ssddanbrown »

warunsl wrote: post #177

Wow. What a coincidence. I installed this last night on my NAS. Came to HN to check if this product has been discussed before and there is a discussion from just today! Anyway, I was wondering if there is a plug-in infrastructure for BookStack in on the roadmap? Thank you for the product. Looks neat in the minimum time I have spent on this so far.

There's no particular "plugin" system. I've always aimed for BookStack to be a "batteries included" system with the essentials built-in and supported with the core.

That said, I have been opening up areas for extension, especially over the last year or two. The following systems are now available:

- REST API [1]

- Webhooks [2]

- Visual Theme System [3] (Overrides of any view/translations/icon used).

- Logical Theme System [4] (Back-end logical hooks/events/extension).

It's possible we could build a common container around these methods to form a "plugin" system but that would require significant time & thought. Not sure I'll ever soon go down that route though due to the cost it could burden upon the project. My current stance is providing opportunities for extension to those who'll be able to maintain it themselves.

[1] https://demo.bookstackapp.com/api/docs

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zIp1ruGpoI

[3] https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/blob/master/dev/do...

[4] https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/blob/master/dev/do...

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

#182

Post by ssddanbrown »

zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #169

What about extensibility? A very important reason why people use Confluence and Jira is there's an infinite supply of add-ons to do almost anything you may want to do, and then you can even implement your own. https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/app/confluence

In the following comment I've described our methods of extension:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858602

Nothing user-friendly like confluence but some core systems are available to customize and extend. Of course, since BookStack is open source, some people have taken the option of maintaining a fork with deeper customizations.

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

#183

Post by johnny_b_g »

Any hosting offerings?

I like that it's OSS, and obviously many will like the option to self-host, however some like to also have the choice of it being hosted (mainly for ease of management/security) - this usually also offers a revenue stream for the project.

Quickly looking at it, seems like it would work out better than Confluence, which we've been using, but found it (Confluence) to be slow to fix/implement features.

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

#184

Post by rtpg »

bogwog wrote: post #119

As someone who hasn’t used Confluence, how is this different from a regular wiki (e.g. MediaWiki)?

It looks nicer than most wiki software out of the box, has nice integrations and editor stuff. So aesthetically it's very pleasing and it's pretty easy to use (the big asterisk is when performance gets in the way and suddenly stuff is slow).

In theory I'm sure you could sit around, write a billion plugins to some other wiki software, and get to confluence. But you could also just pay for Confluence!

"As nice as Confluence but super speedy" is a ... $50 million dollar business (can't say billion cuz I mean atlassian does good work!)

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

#185

Post by ssddanbrown »

johnny_b_g wrote: post #183

Any hosting offerings? I like that it's OSS, and obviously many will like the option to self-host, however some like to also have the choice of it being hosted (mainly for ease of management/security) - this usually also offers a revenue stream for the project. Quickly looking at it, seems like it would work out better than Confluence, which we've been using, but found it (Confluence) to be slow to fix/implement feat…

No hosting offerings from myself right now although there are a couple of companies offering hosting (One of which is a sponsor on the homepage linked in the post).

There was a similar question earlier with my more verbose thoughts in regards to hosting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852376

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

#186

Post by johnny_b_g »

ssddanbrown wrote: post #185
johnny_b_g wrote: post #183

Any hosting offerings? I like that it's OSS, and obviously many will like the option to self-host, however some like to also have the choice of it being hosted (mainly for ease of management/security) - this usually also offers a revenue stream for the project. Quickly looking at it, seems like it would work out better than Confluence, which we've been using, but found it (Confluence) to be slow to fix/implement feat…

No hosting offerings from myself right now although there are a couple of companies offering hosting (One of which is a sponsor on the homepage linked in the post). There was a similar question earlier with my more verbose thoughts in regards to hosting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852376

Ah I missed that - thank you!

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

#187

Post by LilBytes »

ssddanbrown wrote: post #81
LilBytes wrote: post #76

This looks PERFECT. I'll trial it out tomorrow. I can see on individual pages (books?) you're tracking changes, e.g. created and last edited. Are these changes tracked in a history page for version control by any chance, ssdanbrown/OP?

> Are these changes tracked in a history page for version control by any chance, ssdanbrown/OP? Most system changes (Create, Updated, Delete actions) are recorded and displayed in an audit log view for admins. As of the most recentl release, you can trigger webhooks upon any of these; Video example [1]. Changes to pages (where documentation content exists) do have their state changes recorded so you can revert/view/c…

Thank you very much for the response! :)

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

#188

Post by badsectoracula »

From a quick look at the demo it looks nice, however i think that since people are more likely to read than edit, the "Actions" should be lower than the navigation panels. E.g. in this:

https://demo.bookstackapp.com/books/bookstack-demo-site/page...

Instead of "Actions", "Page Navigation", "Book Navigation" it should be "Page Navigation", "Book Navigation", "Actions".

Note: this seems to be an issue when the window width isn't too high to put the actions at the right side. I only noticed it after i wrote the above since i use a narrow width for the browser as my monitor is large and it makes it easier to read text. Regardless, in this "narrow mode" i think the actions should be placed after navigation.

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

#189

Post by caspar »

a10c wrote: post #180
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…

For what it's worth. I work at Atlassian and we don't use Confluence for documenting code.

Also an Atlassian here. For anyone wondering, we tend to use Confluence for planning, decisions, team process, tech specs, etc but use an internal view of DAC[0] for code docs. Think Hugo[1] crossed with redoc[2] with a dash of GraphQL support.

Unfortunately the docs-in-repo + PRs-for-updates approach has way more friction for drive-by-corrections/commentary/Q&A from people not on the team, so it's not a holy grail either.

    [0]: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/
    [1]: https://gohugo.io
    [2]: https://github.com/Redocly/redoc

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

#190

Post by palidanx »

Whoa I can copy/paste images directly into the editor, sweet!

One question though, if I deploy a containerized version via docker and upload images, where do the images reside (it seems like the php uploads folder? Just curious if I had to redeploy the image what volumes I might have to mount as back-upp

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