TWiki 20040902 review

TWiki is a flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise collaboration platform

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 1790K Developer: Peter Thoeny

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TWiki is a flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise collaboration platform. It is a structured Wiki, typically used to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base, or any other groupware tool, on an intranet or on the internet.

Web content can be created collaboratively by using just a browser. Developers can create new web applications based on a Plugin API.

Here are some key features of "TWiki":
Any web browser: Edit existing pages or create new pages by using any web browser. There is no need for ftp or http put to upload pages.
Edit link: To edit a page, simply click on the Edit link at the bottom of every page.
Auto links: Web pages are linked automatically. You do not need to learn HTML commands to link pages.
Text formatting: Simple, powerful and easy to learn text formatting rules. Basically you write text like you would write an e-mail.
Webs: Pages are grouped into TWiki webs (or collections). This allows you to set up separate collaboration groups.
Search: Full text search with/without regular expressions. See a sample search result.
E-mail notification: Get automatically notified when something has changed in a TWiki web. Subscribe in WebNotify.
Structured content: Use TWiki Forms to classify and categorize unstructured web pages and to create simple workflow systems.
File attachments: Upload and download any file as an attachment to a page by using your browser. This is similar to file attachments in an e-mail, but it happens on web pages.
Revision control: All changes to pages and attachments are tracked. Retrieve previous page revisions and differences thereof. Find out who changed what and when.
Access control: Define groups and impose fine grained read and write access restrictions based on groups and users.
Variables: Use variables to dynamically compose your pages. This allows you for example to dynamically build a table of contents: include other pages; or show a search result embedded in a page.
TWiki Plugins: Enhance the TWiki functionality with server side Plugin modules. Developers can create Perl Plugins using the TWiki Plugin API. Some example Plugins:
* ActionTrackerPlugin: Keep track of action items in meeting minutes and notify assignees by e-mail.
* CalendarPlugin: Show a monthly calendar with highlighted events.
* ChartPlugin: Create charts to visualize TWiki tables.
* DatabasePlugin: Get access to data in a database.
* HeadlinesPlugin: Build news portals that show headline news based on RSS news feeds from news sites.
* TWikiDrawPlugin: Use the TWikiDraw Java Applet to create editable drawings embedded in topics.
* SlideShowPlugin: Turn TWiki pages into web-based presentations.
* SpreadSheetPlugin: Add spreadsheet formulae like $SUM($ABOVE()) to TWiki tables.
* more...
Application platform: Developers use the TWiki platform to create web-based applications. The TWiki Variables, Plugins and Plugin API offer a rich environment where domain-specific applications can be built efficiently. An example application is the XpTrackerPlugin which allows teams to track Extreme Programming (XP) projects.
Templates and skins: A flexible templating system separates program logic and presentation. Skins overwrite template headers and footers; page content is unaffected.
Managing pages: Individual pages can be renamed, moved and deleted through the browser.
Managing users: Web based user registration and change of password.
What's new: See recent changes of TWiki webs. The change log can also be exported in XML RSS format for news syndication.
Statistics: Create Statistics of TWiki webs. Find out most popular pages and top contributors.
Preferences: Three levels of preferences: TWikiPreferences for site-level; WebPreferences for each web; and user level preferences.
Topic locking: Users are warned if a page is being edited by an other person. This is to prevent contention, e.g. simultaneous page editing.
Referred-By: Find out back-links to a page.
... plus other features not listed here.