FAQ - Frequently asked questions

For support questions, please see SupportQuestions.

For general project information, please also see the MediaFaq.

English

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What is Foswiki?

Foswiki is an enterprise collaboration and information sharing tool targeted for professional use in many types of companies—from small businesses to large organizations.

Foswiki is a wiki: a website with easily editable web pages. It looks like a normal web site but it encourages contributions, edits, updates, questions, and answers from its users. It's a powerful way of enabling a community to communicate asynchronously using intranet or public internet websites. Foswiki is simple to learn and use. It aims to provide a transparent way for you to publish and exchange your ideas with others over the web and eliminates the one-webmaster syndrome of outdated intranet content.

Foswiki supports storing structured data—name-value pairs—and provides advanced query tools that enable users without programming skills to build powerful yet simple applications to process information and support workflows. Developers can extend the functionality of Foswiki with plugins.

Foswiki is a fork from the TWiki project. Restrictions on the use of the TWiki brand resulted in many of its developers starting the Foswiki project. Foswiki is backwards compatible with all content from older TWiki installations.

Foswiki 1.1 ships with TWikiCompatibilityPlugin installed by default, thus if activated enables most extensions made for TWiki to work under Foswiki.

Foswiki is released under the GNU General Public License.

What is the difference between Foswiki and TWiki?

The Foswiki project is a community-led, open source project. The project was created when the TWiki project changed its governance model to centralize control over its direction.

For more information on what Foswiki can offer you, please see "Why should I use Foswiki?"

Why should I become a Foswiki developer?

The Foswiki community is vibrant and active. Founded by the key active TWiki developers in October, 2008, in three months, the devlopment team has eliminated 120 bugs and made over 2000 checkins that have improved the robustness and maintainability of the Foswiki product.

Now that the software has been scrubbed, plans for new capabilities are underway. See HowYouCanHelp for more information on how you can contribute!

What makes Foswiki an ideal collaboration tool?

Community and corporate wikis are based on a simple concept: allow information to flow as freely as possible by allowing the entire community to edit and update information, with as few barriers as possible. This approach provides a framework that enables an active and involved set of contributors to combine their efforts in creating and improving the data contained within the wiki.

Foswiki goes a step beyond simple aggregation of text documents by providing ways to associate meta-data with pages, and powerful macros that can extract the associated page data and content, based on complex searches. Foswiki also allows you to define a page with various parameters that can be replaced. Using parameterized pages as building blocks, combined with Foswiki's multi-faceted searching capabilities and versatile plugins that can interface with a variety of external APIs or provide additional interactivity, Foswiki users can create flexible and effective applications using Foswiki's Topic Markup Language (TML). Users can enter data using simple forms or TML, and a Foswiki application can combine and display the data in different formats: tabular, graphical, XML, in combination with external Web APIs like Google Maps, you name it!

Examples of Foswiki applications include the following:

• bug/task tracking — see the Foswiki task tracker
• categorized Frequently Asked Question lists — see the Foswiki support question list
• event calendars
• action item registers
• project status reporting
• mashups combining user-entered data with external queries (such as LDAP)

German

Was ist Foswiki?

• Ein in Perl programmiertes Firmenwiki für den Einsatz in Unternehmen und Organisationen
• Ein systemorientiertes Wissensmanagement-System zur strukturierten Ablage von Informationen
• Hierarchische Organisation von Inhalten in Webs, Topics, beliebig vielen Unter-Topics und Attachments
• Automatische Versionierung aller Informationen
• Komplett web-basiert und über den Browser bedienbar
• Weitgehend automatisierte Nutzerverwaltung und Einbindung externer Nutzer (z.B. via LDAP)

Was ist der Unterschied zu TWiki?

• Es handelt sich um genau die gleiche Software, die einfach nur weiterentwickelt wird.
• Komplett überarbeiteter Code und geschlossene Sicherheitslücken.
• Wesentlich aktivere und produktivere Community und wesentlich schnellere Weiterentwicklung.
• Zahlreiche neue Funktionalitäten, die die Community bislang zurückgehalten hat.
• Weiterentwicklungsgeschwindigkeit, die TWiki sicherlich nicht mehr erreichen wird.

Warum sollte man Foswiki einsetzen?

• Es handelt sich um eine richtige Open-Source-Lösung.
• Eine sehr ausgereifte Lösung, die schon seit 1998 entwickelt wird.
• Ein Funktionsumfang, mit dem fast kein anderes System mithalten kann.
• Ressourcenschonung und Flexibilität: schlanker Kern ohne eigene Datenbank und ohne eigenes Dateiformat.
• Komplette Abwärts-Kompatibilität zu TWiki

Was sind die Nachteile von Foswiki?

• Schlechte Usability
• Begrenzte Skalierbarkeit
• Teilweise ziemlich technisch in der Anwendung
• Betagte Struktur und gewachsene Lösung

Was kann ich selbst an Foswiki anpassen?

• Sehr viel: Templates, Plugins und Kern.
• Beispiele für Layout-Anpassungen mit Hilfe der bestehenden Screenshots darstellen.
• Darauf hinweisen, dass man sehr viele Usability-Probleme komplett entfernen kann, wenn man die Templates eh gerade anpasst. Auf diese Weise kann der Nachteil einer suboptimalen Usability relativiert werden.

Warum sollte ich als Perl-Programmierer mit an Foswiki entwickeln?

• Spaß
• Sympathische Community
• Hohe Wahrnehmung in sehr vielen Unternehmen

French

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