A great wiki engine behind Wikidot.com is now free software as Wikidot Inc owners: Pieter Hintjens and Piotr Frąckowiak released the code on AGPLv3 license just today. This is great news for the Internet as Wikidot is one of the most advanced wiki engines out there, leaving MediaWiki and TWiki far behind.

Piotr Frąckowiak explains the reasons for open-sourcing Wikidot as follows:

Our users want access to the code, and we want our users to get involved in the project. We believe that freeing our software is great for our community, and great for our business. The Affero license gives users the right to modify, share, and even resell improvements to the code. It’s like the GPLv3 but also requires service providers who extend our Wikidot code to share their improvements

Wikidot engine, used on Wikidot.com, a wiki farm which is gaining more and more publicity in the net, is a full-featured product offering such MediaWiki nice-haves as:

• powerful wiki syntax with LaTeX-style equations, bibliography items, footnotes and more,
• extensibility provided by code snippets,
• modern interface filled with AJAX for better usability,
• forums for each site with RSS support,
• private messages,
• decent roles and permissions system,

As Wikidot 1.0 is fairly advanced and usable, with Wikidot 2.0 — currently under development — Wikidot will truly become the most advanced open-source wiki software on Earth, a direct competitor to Atlassian’s commercial Confluence wiki. It’s surely worth giving it a try just now.

Project’s source code (for both current version — 1.0 — and the development branch — 2.0) can be found in the subversion repository. Wikidot requires PostgreSQL 8.1 database, Apache2 werb server, PHP 5 installed with some extensions and GNU/Linux. Detailed installation description for Ubuntu and Debian is located in the project’s website: wikidot.org/doc.

We’d like to also remind you that PolishLinux.org uses Wikidot for its public wiki available under: wiki.polishlinux.org. You can use it to help us update the information about GNU/Linux and BSD distributions for the purpose of Distro comparison.