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Wiking

accessible content management system

Maintainer: Tomas Cerha <cerha@brailcom.org>

Introduction

Wiking CMS is an open source content management system. You can manage your web-site using a web browser.

Primary design goals:

• Accessibility for website visitors
• Accessible content management and authoring
• Support for internationalization and multilingual content
• Conformance to W3C and other relevant standards
• Extensibility

Key features:

• Content creation using a generalized and simple to learn "structured text" format
• Page attachments (external media such as images, documents, recordings or video embedded in pages)
• Two-phase publication process (you can change your content and publish the changes anytime later)
• Authentication, user and access rights management
• Built-in modules for site news and planner/calendar with RSS support
• Predefined customizable styles and color themes
• Wiking API allows development of Wiking CMS extensions or complete standalone web applications.
• All components are licensed under GNU GPL or similar free licenses

Demo

Check the following sites to see Wiking CMS in action:

• http://wiking.brailcom.org
• http://manaslu.arctica.cz
• http://www.brailcom.org
• http://www.ktn.cz

Sample applications written as Wiking CMS extensions:

• Wiking BTS (Bug Tracking System): http://bugs.brailcom.org
• Wiking LMS (Learning Management System): http://courses.brailcom.org
• Wiking Biblio (Digital library): http://biblio.ktn.cz

Multilingual support

Multiple language variants of the content can be managed seamlessly and Wiking defines the logic needed for serving it. This is done using the Content Negotiation technique and the user is also able to override the language preferences configured in the browser by choosing a language manually.

Wiking user interface is currently fully translated into English and Czech and translations into Spanish, German, Slovak, Polish and Norwegian exist in different stages of development. Using the GNU gettext framework makes the translation process as simple as possible. Anyone willing to contribute translations is welcome – please contact the project maintainer or the mailing list for instructions.

Technology

Wiking is written in Python and is based on two other important components:

• LCG ... provides content abstraction, internationalization support and html generation (see LCG project website for more information).
• Pytis ... provides data abstraction, modularization and database access.

In fact, Wiking is nothing else than a web interface to the Pytis toolkit and an application built on top of this toolkit. The actual CMS logic resides in modules and the engine itself is just a thin layer. This makes the system easily extensible and maintainable.

The current implementation runs on Apache web server (over mod_python) and relies on PostgreSQL to store its data. In theory, these components could be replaced, however.

History

The first prototype of Wiking was released sometimes in late 2003. It was written in Perl and it served as a platform for experimenting with web content accessibility and user interface design. The CMS itself was intentionally kept simplistic, but many important features, such as multilingual support or two-phase publication process were already included. It evolved slowly for about three years and ended up in June 2006 with the version number 0.3.12. The 0.3.x version is further maintained, but no new features are added.

The development of a new version written in Python began in June 2006 and the primary motivation was the challenge to use the LCG to provide an accessible web interface to the Pytis toolkit. This combination

Documentation

Full documentation is available as a part of the project and is distributed together with the source code.

You can browse the HTML version on-line.

Source code

Latest released version is 0.4.4.

The source code is managed using GIT. There are the following options to get the current development version:

• Clone the git repository from git://git.freebsoft.org/git/wiking
• Use GIT web interface.

Please send patches to project maintainer.

Mailing-lists

There is a public mailing-list wiking@lists.freebsoft.org for this project.

This list is for for Wiking developers, as well as for users. If you want to contribute the development, propose a new feature, get help or just be informed about the latest news, don't hesitate to subscribe. The communication on this list is held in English.

See also the listing of all Free(b)soft mailing lists.

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