SMWCon Fall 2012/BlueSpice

Like SMW, BlueSpice is extending MediaWiki with a lot of functionality. It is a set of extensions which is designed to facilitate the use in non encyclopaedic contexts such as enterprise environments. It is an all in one bundle that aims to cover for all the basic needs of a professional MediaWiki installation.

Among other things, BlueSpice includes a new skin with dynamic information and a flexible navigation concept. Also there is improved editing support with a WYSIWYG-editor and several assistants for linking various sources. There are some additional communication features like a blog and a shoutbox. Interaction among authors is encouraged by displaying pictures of the authors of each article. Search has been enriched with a facetted search feature. For site maintainers, there is a centralized administration page for users.

Semantic functionality is an increasing demand for our users and we do maintain several installations running BlueSpice and Semantic MediaWiki. There are some challenges, though, to a deeper integration of both systems, among them duplication of functionality, a very different code base and different approaches to user interface design. So I'd like to reach out and discuss ways of tackling these issues to the benefit of both systems.

In my opinion, one of the most pressing questions for both communities will be the compatibility and versioning politics of MediaWiki itself. In the MediaWiki world, development is mainly focussed on Wikipedia deployment. One result is the quarterly release cycle, which puts some adoption pressure on BlueSpice and Semantic MediaWiki. I'd like to discuss how SMW and BlueSpice each cope with the issue and maybe even, what we can do to make things easier for us and other third parties.