The German company Hallo Welt! has been developing the open sourcewiki software BlueSpice since 2007. The project was originally initiated as "bluepedia" by IBM, who wanted to deploy MediaWiki but were unable to live with its downsides. In 2011, Hallo Welt! decided to publish their wiki as free and open-source software. The stable version of BlueSpice for MediaWiki was released July 4, 2011. From this point on, a free download has been available at SourceForge. The first release of BlueSpice was a couple of extensions and is today a complete stand-alone distribution, which has the latest MediaWiki as a core system but offers in the free version more than 50 distinct extensions and a completely different user interface. Following independent sources the BlueSpice free distribution is one of the most popular wiki software for knowledge management in organisations. In autumn 2013, Hallo Welt! released the completely reworked version BlueSpice 2. According to the BlueSpice developers this release aims for opening up BlueSpice for freelance developers in the global MediaWiki community and multiple language versions. In 2014, BlueSpice for MediaWiki became a project of Translatewiki.net. In January 2015 the developers announced that they will change to a subscription model.
Functionality
Some central features of BlueSpice are:
Visual editing: allowing editing without any knowledge of wiki code.
Search and navigation: An extended search offers improved search functionalities, like faceted search. The search results can further be sorted or filtered by category, namespace, author, semantic data, data type etc. Any files attached are also searched. It also provides common features like autocomplete and search as you type.
Quality assurance and review tools : Pages for instance can be assigned to a reviewer. This allows articles to be reviewed and approved.
Book function: Individual articles can be grouped into article collections to create manuals, documentations or instructions with chapter navigation. The books can be exported with it in different formats together with the respective file attachments.
Communication: Additional discussion and blog functionalities, a timeline and notification system support editorial processes.
Administration: Convenient management of users, namespaces, groups, rights and settings.
Technology
BlueSpice is written in the PHP programming language and uses MySQL, Apache/IIS, Tomcat. The editions can be installed on top of an existing MediaWiki installation or as a standalone installation that includes MediaWiki. The distribution is a collection of extensions, which can be extended with user-specific features or skins. While every single extension can be deactivated, BlueSpice editions integrate and standardize extensions to improve the user experience and maintenance.
Licensing
According to the MediaWiki standard all extensions are published under the GPLv3 license.
