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

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

#141

Post by ssddanbrown »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #96
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 tri…

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

Thank you so much!

> In mediawiki it's finding an extension, figuring out how to configure it, and then worrying about keeping it up to date.

I've always attempted to be "batteries included" with BookStack due to this frustration. Means we have to be more limited in abilities but hopefully provide a better experience for what we do allow.

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

#142

Post by yebyen »

philonoist wrote: post #84
1cvmask wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could potentially add passwordless MFA from saas pass to your project. Good luck with it.

I apologize but may I know what you mean by "saas pass"?

No post body was provided.

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

#143

Post by solarkraft »

I remember considering BookStack while looking for a (surprise) replacement for Confluence.

The main thing that led me to stop considering it pretty quickly is precisely the concept of books - I find it both unnecessarily complicated and unnecessarily limiting.

My Org now uses DokuWiki. It has a lot of issues (the prosemirror visual editor is a good start, but in beta and out of development, for example). But it's also the least sucking option I've found. Most Wiki software severely screws up the editing experience, which may not be such a good idea when you want to get people to document things. I'm glad Bookstack does this right.

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

#144

Post by solarkraft »

dont__panic wrote: post #130
polote wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 stat…

Confluence sucks! But it does have one of the best editing experiences I've seen (it also sucks, but less than the rest). You can privately draft pages before publishing them, get diffs of versions, it auto-saves and you even get real time collaboration with others. That's worth a lot, imo.

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

#145

Post by mgkimsal »

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 always found the ability to draft confluence docs then create jira tickets from within confluence to be the 'obvious' use case, but I don't often see people do it. Or... I've seen some orgs do it a lot, and some not at all (even when they have both jira and confluence together).

Size of org/team is probably a factor, but the linking between the two products is one of the few things I see it has that most other tools don't. It's probably because most other tools are single-use, and they focus on one or the other, but not both sides.

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

#146

Post by solarkraft »

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.

Huh, so that's why the last update of Argon was 2 years ago :-)

Thanks for making it! I consider it to be the best theme available for DokuWiki and my organization uses a forked version of it (https://github.com/fablab-luenen/dokuwiki-krypton).

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

#147

Post by kyriakos »

dont__panic wrote: post #130
polote wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 stat…

Agree about no one finding your documents. I have trouble finding my own documents in it, don't expect others to be able to find them. Unless you are absolutely obsessive about organisation and linking documents things remain a disjointed mess, would have been cleaner to store markdown in the file system in a directory tree than in confluence.

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

#148

Post by iambateman »

ssddanbrown wrote: post #26
iambateman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dove into your Laravel code the other day to see how you organized things. Thanks for making it open so I could learn!

Happy to help! I will say that I would in no way present it as an example of a clean codebase. 6 years of weekend and night development, while having significant code understanding/learning during that time, has lead to somewhat of a mix of ideas and approaches. Constantly trying to re-align things though!

Totally makes sense!

there’s a lot to be learned in any event, since a lot of my projects are night/weekend ones too.

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

#149

Post by chrisweekly »

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.

Obsidian integration would make me (and likelya bunch of its > 400k other users) happy!

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

#150

Post by kyriakos »

pm90 wrote: post #120
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…

> It feels like most companies that use it already use the Atlassian stack of JIRA/Bitbucket, then feel the need to tack Confluence onto the end because it's there. Literally the only reason it exists. JIRA is the hook that gets companies on to the rest of the horrible Atlassian stack.

As if jira itself is not horrible. But to be fair to jira I recently tried the cloud version which is untouched by any scrum masters or management and its way better than what I have to endure in my day job with hundreds of customizations it has received over the years to shoehorn every kind of metric
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