Up! is an extremely simple, yet powerful markdown-based CMS/Wiki, to create easily and fast the most light-weight and fastest wiki's, documentations or simple websites, without writing one line of any PHP code, HTML or CSS.
This is a pre-release for the Version 2.0. Check the Changelog to see what is and what isn't implemented and what is planned.
- Uses Markdown (an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format), which ...
- ... it automatically converts to a fully styled and navigational wiki-like site.
- Simply focus on the authoring task, not on coding or styling
- Create any individual navigation including dropdown menus
- Uses responsive design, HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, Bootstrap
- Select from several ready-to-use themes
- Requires no knowledge of these technologies by the author
- No complex installations and no database required
- Structure your documents and navigation any way you want them
- Create several depths of different sections each with it's navigation, if needed
- Create a multi-language wiki easily
- Can be fully crawled and indexed by search engines
- Custom styles (if you really need to add some CSS)
- Custom footer and 404 "page not found"
- Add Google Analytics by simply adding your property ID (don't worry about implementation details)
- Activate code syntax highlighting
- Gimmicks advance Markdown with rich client functions like alerts and youtube video integration
- Advanced users can also modify the default page layout html
- Site search
The main difference is, that almost every MarkDown parser is like a raw tool. It takes a piece of MarkDown text, parses and converts it into another format or for the browser.
However, these ones are rarely file-focused, one needs to write additional code to even have a file read, parsed and stored or served to the browser.
Nearly none of them deals with multiple files (some not even with files), let alone with document structuring, navigation, styling and more.
This is what Up! does, it provides a simple ready-to-use solution to create a fully styled and navigable wiki/site as simple and fast as possible, while allowing the author to focus almost completely on the actual task of authoring. Just get your wiki quickly Up! ;)
The documentation has been split from this document into the docs folder, for two reasons:
- To be easier to read
- To provide an example implementation of how you can use Up!
Once you install Up!, you can browse the documentation by opening http:///docs/ in your browser and you can use these files as starting point to modify and experiment with.
Browse the full documentation here or start at Getting started.
There is also a FAQ.
Installation is simple and completed in less a minute. PHP 5.4 or higher is required to use it.
After cloning or downloading the repository, no further installation steps are required. Simply refer to the other documentation for first steps on starting to create your wiki/site.
Note: For users upgrading from version 1: the composer dependency exists no longer, everything runs out of the box.
You can safely delete any vendor directory that your old installation has.
Up! started as an drop-in replacement for MDwiki, because I needed a tool to provide documentation without additional installations to clients who purchased modules to use within another software.
MDWiki served me at beginning well. However, I wanted to provide that same documentation under a common domain, speak have them all into a helpdesk-like site. Having several MDWiki installations for each one would been overkill and too much maintenance. Also, I would not be able to combine them all into one navigation without maintaining several versions, one for the central helpdesk and one for the one included in the modules purchased by clients.
Further, MDWiki sites have some drawbacks, the most important is that they can't be indexed by search engines at all. But it was important that someone searching for the articles would find them in Google&Co.
As such, I created Up! that would render the sites before sending them to the browser instead of doing it in Javascript like MDWiki, would allow search engines to crawl everything, would allow to have it splitted into sections and combined them as needed with each section having their own individual navigation.
Up! is as light-weight as MDWiki, it is so lightweight that it will serve pages nearly as lightning-fast as static html pages. The server-side rendering also benefits those with slower devices, as the pages will render faster in the browser as no additional client-side processing is taking place. This helps providing a consequently similar experience on all devices.
Because of this history, sites using MDWiki can use Up! in most cases as drop-in replacement, special care was given that both are mostly compatible. See the FAQ for compatibility details.
Up! is created by Dimitrios Karvounaris.
Thank you to all that inspired and made Up! possible:
- MDWiki - Inspired by this software
- Bootswatch - Provides theme support for Up!
- cebe/markdown - super fast, highly extensible markdown parser
Up! is licensed under the terms of the GNU AGPLv3 with additional terms and linking exceptions.
A commercial license is available upon request without some of these restrictions. Contact the author for details.