Embedded Markdown Wiki: a wiki engine written in scala, which you can embed in any application, especially for play framework apps. It is a great match for collaborative, content-intensive websites. The main feature is its extensibility with either scripting, code or DSL.
Features:
- markdown as the wiki langauge
- classic wiki link syntax with customizable extensions
- mongoDB for storage, customizable persistance
- customizable authentication and authorization
Versions and technologies
- scala 2.11.8
- commonmark as the markdown parser
- mongodb/casbah/salat for persistency.
- bootstrap 3.3.4
- play framework 2.4
... and you can't beat markdown for wikis: HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format!
You can embedd this in any Java or Scala project. Here are a few websites built on top of this wiki engine:
- http://notes.razie.com - an online note taking application
- http://www.effectiveskiing.com - online ski teaching app
- http://www.coolscala.com and http://www.enduroschool.com - blogs
- http://rk.dieselapps.com - a sports wiki with calendar and forms extensions, club membership etc
- http://www.dieselapps.com - rapid development and testing tools
See the demos/samples included:
Features:
- include photos, images
- write html directly in the pages, create nice layouts
- API to extract just contents or format html and embed
- history, revert to earlier versions
- clone entire wiki locally for "development" and then push changes remotely
- easy to organize and browse: search, by tags etc
- classic wiki link syntax with customizable extensions
- templating
- authorization, authentication, different levels of visibility
- WikiPath, surfing the wiki content via built-in wiki-path capability
- runs on the JVM
- Java compatible and embedded/embeddable in any Java product (as separate micro-service or library)
- mongoDB for storage, customizable persistance
- etc
This is not your average markdown wiki... you can use it to create complete websites and apps:
- you can have users, assign permissions
- supports multiple hosting right off the bat, with custom domains too
- it's a domain-driven wiki (see details below)
See the [http://www.dieselapps.com/engine]
What's a wiki domain engine? Well, more than a plain wiki engine... read some of this wiki engine's features here: http://www.dieselapps.com/wiki/Admin:Wiki_Engine - it's got quite a bit of functionality I'm exploring... including:
- [http://www.dieselapps.com/wiki/Admin:WikiPath]
- [http://blog.razie.com/2012/05/free-flowing-wiki-domain-models-and.html]
More details to come!
Many content-intensive websites need editable pages and markdown is a nice, user-friendly language. Adding some wiki-style markups can make it so much more functional. You can evolve your website in real time, engaging the audience as needed etc.
You can focus on the overall layout and functionality of your app and leave the editable details (such as description of a task or details for a calendar event or whatever) to be written in Markdown and stored as a wiki page in this embedded wiki.
See some usage scenarios below - more to come.
Use this engine to create editable help/documentation pages within your app. Users can help create/update/maintain help and documentation pages which link to each-other nicely in a web of help.
Easily add social features embedded in your app, like forums, discussions and blogs - all as wiki topics.
The engine will store the page, render it as html (part of whatever page you will put it in) and manage links etc as per general wiki principles... making it easy for a user of your app to link from a calendar event to an action and from the action to some subjects whatnot.
The other integration model, the idea that this was written for, is where your entire app is a wiki, ran by the wiki engine and you can massively customize content and page layouts.
Here's how to use the dark CSS for bootstrap: http://www.coolscala.com/wiki/Cool_Scala/Dark_skin_for_bootstrap
This started as a research into domain-driven wikis:
- domain/category definintion
- engine driven by the category: guides creation of topics, their properties and relationships
- scala scripts - there is possibility to embed runnable scala and Javascript scripts in the wiki topics - these scripts are executed when the page is displayed and add complex behavior to the pages, such as displaying the current number of members in a club etc