BlueSpice

BlueSpice is free wiki software based on the MediaWiki engine and licensed with the GNU General Public License. It is especially developed for businesses as an enterprise wiki distribution for MediaWiki and used in over 150 countries.

The freely available version BlueSpice free is considered one of the most popular wiki computer programs for knowledge management in companies.

History
The German company Hallo Welt! has been working on the development of an open source wiki based on MediaWiki since 2007. The origins of the later BlueSpice software go back to an initiative by the IBM CTO Gunter Dueck, who initiated an internal company wiki for IBM Germany in 2007 under the name "bluepedia". The model for the bluepedia project was Wikipedia and accordingly the platform was based on MediaWiki. However, in daily operation, additional requirements arose for the software used. This led to the founding of a company that would develop and provide the missing functions in the future.

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. A key feature of the software was the provision of a WYSIWYG editor, which at the time was based on the TinyMCE editor.

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 and technology


BlueSpice is written in the PHP programming language and uses MySQL, Apache/IIS, Tomcat. BlueSpice is released in a free edition and two paid editions. The free edition adds more than 50 extensions to a MediaWiki, mainly in the areas of:


 * Editing: A version of the MediaWiki VisualEditor is delivered, which, unlike the original, contains additional functions, such as an easier procedure for uploading documents or inserting dynamic content. The creation of new pages is supported by page templates.
 * Search and navigation: An extended search (Elasticsearch) 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.
 * Administration: Convenient management of users, namespaces, groups, rights and settings.

Licensing and distribution
All extensions of the BlueSpice distributions are under open source licenses. The functions written by Hallo Welt! are published under the license GPLv3.

The free version is made available for download as a classic server installation in a tarball or as a Docker image, with BlueSpice free having the widest distribution via the official Docker version (with more than 1 million pulls in three years).