KodoBlog | tech practice & philosophy

Highway to brilliant wiki, part 1. Brillixy.

Hey!

I am unsatisfied.

It’s 21st century, the age of perfect web-frameworks and rapid development. But there’s no good wiki-like engine to satisfy reasonable requirements.

There are Trac, DokuWiki and many others and others. By the way, I really appreciate Trac and DokuWiki. But I need less. And more.

So, I just need an engine which:

• has wiki-like basis: users can create, edit and delete pages,
• has hierarchical pages structure,
• can be easily themed, design is really matters,
• is written in Python / Django and uses best web-development practices.

Brillixy

I started project to make such engine. I called it “Brillixy”. It’s hosted here: http://bitbucket.org/rudi/brillixy

Some design goals are defined:

• keep specific part as tiny as possibe, reuse proven Django applications, write new ones for generic tasks
• it should has multiple-project structure, so single installation may be used by some team for a number of projects

And some design decisions are done:

• use django-treebeard for storing pages hierarchically
• use django-tagging for tagging
• use markdown as a basis for markup language, use flavours for it, use autotext to provide specific syntax

What’s next?

I’m planning to release v0.1 with most basic functions:

• creating, editing, deleting pages
• commenting pages
• simple tagging, no AJAX
• simple permissions scheme, allow everything to authenticated users
• no changesets view at this point

It should be enougth to start use it for some project. I’m planning to complete it before 9 May 2010.