[Jedd]

Confluence is objectively horrible, without a doubt, but adding (yet) another candidate to the marketplace isn't really fixing Confluence. For starters, I'm still going to be stuck using Confluence.

I'm still sad at the death of DekiWiki / Mindtouch -- it was one of the best wikis I ever used, but was abandoned around 2010. It offered a structured hierarchy, a decent editor, was performant, looked good, self-hosted, scriptable extensibility, etc.

I've never found a satisfactory replacement.

[francescol]

Maybe "Here's how I plan to rectify it" would have worked better... putting that aside you Jedd are in luck! Scribe isn't just any candidate, it's the candidate (If I can get enough people to throw money at me so I don't have to go get another job). I'll have a look at DekiWiki and Mindtouch tonight. What did they offer in terms of structured hierarchy that other tools don't? Also interested to see what this scriptable extensibility is.

I do agree that getting Enterprises to buy into my tool over Confluence will be really difficult, and until then I'll struggle to help you, but I'm lining up as many talks with people that can make that call as possible to see what I would have to do to make that a reality. One thing you might find interesting is that I plan to make Scribe free for public wikis, so while it might take some time for your team to use it, it might be useful to you if you do open source work? And if you like it enough maybe you can recommend it to your team, who knows!

[Jedd]

Hi Francesco - happy to reminisce.

Refer the wayback machine, as Mindtouch took down their documentation a while ago. Short of running up a live copy [1] on a VMware instance, the fastest way to get an idea of the features is to review their user & API documentation [2].

The sourceforge site has some screenshots, but I suspect there are very few publicly accessible instances anymore, as the thing was so damned hard to patch (VM images were how they distributed the software). I did find this [3] but you won't get to experience editor / API, only the navigation.

Deki's hierarchy worked - most other products I looked at this was an effort (plugins, extensions, etc) - either way it prevented orphan pages, and reduced the risk of losing pages or people accidentally creating duplicates.

The hierarchy was also reflected in the URL, which is just lovely (compare Sharepoint). Confluence has a hierarchy, but the URL does weird things, and I think there's a global namespace for pages IIRC. Their URL's sometimes go a bit whacky, but haven't worked out why.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/dekiwiki/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120828154742/http://developer....

[3] http://www.osslab.tw/

[iKevinShah]

Genuine question: In the market of SaaS and cloud, is there a market for performant and self-hosted solutions for the enterprise space?

[Jedd]

Absolutely, so long as you mean 'in the alleged era of' rather than 'in the market of', of course.

But the fact lots of people still have DC's, or host stuff on their office server, or don't want other organisations outages to be their outages, or be exposed to billing tomfoolery, easy integration with other internal systems without blowing myriad holes through their firewalls, (etc) means there's still a market for on-premises software.