WikkaWiki
For the neopagan religion and religious movement, see Wicca.
WikkaWiki (often shortened as Wikka) is a free, lightweight, and standards-compliant wiki engine. Written in PHP, it uses MySQL to store pages. WikkaWiki is a fork of Wakka Wiki to which a number of new features have been added. It is designed for speed, fine-grained access control, extensibility, and security, and is released under the GNU General Public License.
History
In 2003, the development of Wakka Wiki came abruptly to an end although a large community of users and contributors was still posting bugfixes, extensions, and new functions. First released in May 2004 by Jason Tourtelotte, WikkaWiki rapidly grew into a project aiming to remain faithful to Wakka’s heritage of a lightweight engine with readable and accessible code. It was the first wiki engine to introduce mindmapping support allowing users to collaboratively edit mindmaps via wiki pages, a feature largely adopted by the majority of other wikis thereafter. WikkaWiki has recently seen a substantial increase in development activity thanks to its team of developers and community of contributors.
Wikka vision
Compared to heavier wiki engines, which integrate several built-in functions, WikkaWiki’s goal is to keep its core as small as possible while developing an architecture that supports easy extensibility through plugin modules. Wikka’s backend is based on a MySQL relational database, which makes it fast, reliable and more scalable than wiki engines based on flat text storage.
The latest version 1.2 was released on September 1, 2009. This release is a major feature release introducing substantial new functionality. According to Secunia, WikkaWiki does not suffer from any unpatched vulnerability as of the latest release.
Wikka features
Among the distinctive features of this wiki engine:
- Support for different types of embedded elements:
- images
- Flash
- tabular data
- safe HTML code
- RSS feeds
- i-frames
- mindmaps, through built-in support for FreeMind data
- Advanced access control with user registration, password management, and provision for user profiles, as well as access control lists on a per-page basis.
- Administration modules to manage pages and users, including tools for bulk operations like user removal or page reversion.
- Advanced syntax highlighting using GeSHi:
- support for 68 markup/programming languages
- easily customizable output
- line numbering
- clickable markup pointers to official documentation
- on-the-fly downloading of embedded code blocks
- Several page-related features, including full revision control, comments, categories, text searching, page cloning, advanced referrer management, file uploading/downloading interface, and a GUI page editor.
- W3C compliant XHTML 1.0 transitional and CSS.
- Theme support
- CSS-defined printable view.
- Advanced tools for publishing page revisions, including:
- RSS feeds for recent modifications and page revisions (with autodiscovery)
- WikiPing client functionality, allowing page changes to be broadcast and tracked on a remote WikiPing server
- SmartTitle function, generating human- and search-engine-friendly page titles.
- A web-based wizard to install the package and to upgrade from WakkaWiki.
- A large repository of user-contributed plugins.
Development
Forthcoming releases may include:
- Enhanced configurability (e.g., user selectable/editable skins and menus).
- Dynamically-generated API documentation.
- API for syndicating content from remote wikis.
- Google Maps support.
- Plugin architecture for modularization
Documentation
A dedicated server provides extensive documentation and tutorials, targeted at different categories of users, from the end user to the developer.