it seems like there is only one global NEWS section per space. is there anyway to have multiple blogs within confluence?
Each user has their own blogs, and you can create multiple spaces. AFAIK, there isn't a way to have multiple news streams within one space.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-30105
According to the atlassian rep, "We've talked about this in the past before and concluded we don't have any plans on doing this in the foreseeable future".
Just to clarify - for a user to have their own blog they have to create their own personal space. With the most recent versions of Confluence (I think 3.1+) the word 'News' has been changed to 'Blog'.
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Is anyone aware of an already existing MediaWiki Extension that would allow users to ask questions in a similar manner to this website or yahoo answers. I've been looking for an extension to allow users to ask/answer questions referring to specific pages for my wiki and I was hoping someone might have already implemented this.
I've been having no luck while searching considering the key words I've been using to describe what I'm looking for end up returning a wide range of results.
I think there are currently these options:
The simplest is the talk page, available for every article. You could use a main page talk (see Wikipedia example - though Wikipedia uses it only for discussion about main page content, not for general discussion) or Village Pump / Community portal idea for general discussions. Not ideal but it works.
You can improve on this somewhat using the LiquidThreads extension. This enhances the talk pages but does not include gaming elements found here (e.g. up votes).
If you just want to get community views, you can use a poll like QPoll.
Finally, you can use a Chat room.
FWIW - I asked a similar question over on meta.
(You may also be interested in Wikis and Wikipedia.)
Currently there is Wikia Answers that is essentially MediaWiki based website but with excremental extensions for Q&A.
Many of its extensions are not yet available directly for download (You may get the website extensions on https://github.com/Wikia
I would be questioning why you're using Wikipedia for a project like this in the first place. It simply isn't designed for it. I think that you'd get more out of looking at a system that thinks about a website as a collection of datachunks, rather than a collection of documents (which is what wikipedia is GREAT at). Something like Drupal is going to get you where you want to be far faster that wikipedia - in fact, it's already be done: https://drupal.org/project/answers. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar exists for joomla, or even wordpress.
If you're looking at wikipedia because you're already using it for part of your site, there's no reason why you can't run another CMS alongside it.
When you search in google, when searching for a term, you can click "Discussion" on the left hand side of the page. This will lead you to forum based discussions which you can select. I was in the process of designing a discussion board for a usergroup and I would like for google to index my data with post time.
You can filter the results by "Any Time" - "Past Hour" - "Past 24 Hours" - "Past Week" - etc.
What is the best way to ensure that the post date is communicated to google? RSS feed for thread? Special HTML label tag with particular id? Or some other method?
Google continually improves their heuristics and as such, I don't think there are any (publicly known) rules for what you describe. In fact, I just did a discussion search myself and found the resulting pages to have wildly differing layouts, and not all of them have RSS feeds or use standard forum software. I would just guess that Google looks for common indicators such as Post #, Author, Date.
Time-based filtering is mostly based on how frequently Google indexes your page and identifies new content (although discussion pages could also be filtered based on individual post dates, which is once again totally up to Google). Just guessing, but it might also help to add Last-Modified headers to your pages.
I believe Google will simply look at when the content appeared. No need for parsing there, and no special treatment required on your end.
i once read a paper from a googler (a paper i sadly can't find anymore, if somebody finds it, please give me a note) where it was outlines. a lot of formulas and so on, but the bottom line was: google has analyzed the structure of the top forum systems on the web. it does not use a page metaphor to analyse it, but breaks the forum down into topics, threads and posts.
so basically, if you use a standard, popular forum system, google knows that it is a forum and puts you into the discussion segment. if you build your own forum software it is probably best to use existing, established forum conventions (topics, threads, posts, authors....).
Here's the scenario I'm imagining.
Simple blog, users typically post comments in a comments form at the bottom of each blog article. Instead of that, using the Twitter API, pull tweets based on a hashtag. Base the hashtag on the article id (i.e. #site10201) where site is a prefix and the number is the article id.
Then provide a link to post a tweet using the hashtag., which would then get picked up in your twitter api pull.
I'm imagining horrible spam issues, but other than that, bad idea?
Has some drawbacks to more run-of-the-mill database systems:
Additional network overhead. Most self-hosted blogs would typically rely on database and blog being on the same server (physical or virtual) so db-lookup is fast (and reliable) compared to twitter API requests.
Caching issues. One host is only allowed X requests of twitter at a time (the next request is going to end up a 404), and how are you going to manage that from your website for a scenario which becomes steadily more complex as multiple articles are added? Presumably you need to authenticate so the easy-way out is a security liability. (The easy way out being to use JavaScript on the at the browser to perform the actual request, neatly circumvents the problem in 20/80 fashion.) Granted most blogs don't get that kind of traffic. ;)
You tie your precious or not so precious comments to the mercy of the fail whale. Which is kind of odd considering a self-hosted blog basically means you want to have such control in the first place by not using a service like blogger.
Is it possible to ensure unicity of hash tags --in the general case? What are you going to do if someone had the same bright idea, only took the name of the tag 5ms before you did? Would you end up pulling the drivel of someone else's blog comments rather than the brilliance you have come to expect from yours? ;)
Lesser point: you rely on others to have a twitter account. Anonymous replies are off the table.
TOS and other considerations that may be imposed on you by twitter, either now or in future. (2) is actually a major item of Twitter's TOS.
I have a Wordpress MU instance installed.
I allow self-registration, and self-creation of blogs.
I have a user who has created a blog for a Chemistry class. He wants his 100 students to be able to self-register and become authors on this blog.
By default, when you follow the Wordpress MU register link, you are signing up for a site-wide account not for this specific blog.
How do I do this? It would be very painful to have to add the 100 students one by one as the administrator. Besides that, we don't actually have a list of the 100 email addresses.
I need a way that people can either request to become part of the blog, or automatically start contributing right away.
Try asking in the BudyPress forums, BudyPress is a social networking plugin for MU. (It might actually be closer to what your looking for)
What I'm doing is hiding registration on the main site and forwarding them to first find their blog and then register on the blog's website for the group for them to join.
In Settings->General why not use the option that lets anyone register. Then the students can each provide their email?
Then what about the Tools->Import->WordPress facility? First do Tools->Export and look at how the file is structured, then create your own XML file with just your users, then do the Tools->Import->WordPress thing.
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I've used a WordPress blog and a Screwturn Wiki (at two separate jobs) to store private, company-specific KB info, but I'm looking for something that was created to be a knowledge base. Specifically, I'd like to see:
Free/low cost
Simple method for users to subscribe to KB (or just sections) to get updates
Ability to do page versioning/audit changes
Limit access to certain pages for certain users
Very simple method of posting/editing articles
Very simple method of adding images to articles
Excellent (fast, accurate) searching abilities
Ability to rate and comment on articles
I liked using the Wordpress blog because it allowed me to use Live Writer to add/edit articles and images, but it didn't have page versioning (that I could see).
I like using Screwturn wiki because of it's ability to track article versions, and I like it's clean look, but some non-technical people balk at the input and editing.
I second Luke's answer.
I can Recommend Confluence and here is why:
I tested extensively many commercial and free Wiki based solutions. Not a single one is a winner on all accounts, including confluence. Let me try to make your quest a little shorter by summarizing what I have learned to be a pain and what is important:
WYSIWYG is a most have feature for the Enterprise. A wiki without it, skip it
Saying that, in reality, WYSIWYG doesn't work perfectly. It is more of a feature you must have to get the casual users not be afraid of the monster, and start using it. But you and anyone that wants to seriously create content, will very quickly get used to the wiki markup. it is faster and more reliable.
You need good permissions controls (who can see, edit etc' a page). confluence has good, but I have my complaints (to complicated to be put here)
You will want a good export feature. Most will give you a single page "PDF" export, but you need much more. For example, lets say you have an FAQ, you want to export the entire FAQ right? will that work?
Macros: you want a community creating macros. You asked for example about the ability to rate pages, here is a link to a Macro for Confluence that lets you do that
Structure: you want to be able to say that a page is a child of a different page, and be able to browse the data. The wikipedia model, of orphaned pages with no sturcture will not work in the Enterprise. (think FAQ, you want to have a hierarchy no?)
Ability to easily attache picture to be embedded in the body of the page/article. In confluence, you need to upload the image and then can embed it, it could be a little better (CTR+V) but I guess this is easy enough for 80% of the users.
At the end of the day, remember that a Wiki will be valuable to you the more flexible it is. It needs to be a "blank" canvas, and your imagination is then used to "build" the application. In Confluence, I found 3 different "best practices" on how to create a FAQ. That means I can implement MANY things.
Some examples (I use my Wiki for)
FAQ: any error, problem is logged. Used by PS and ENG. reduced internal support time dramatically
Track account status: I implemetned sophisticated "dashboard" that you can see at a glance which customer is at what state, the software version they have, who in the company 'owns" the custoemr etc'
Product: all documentation, installation instructions, the "what's new" etc
Technical documentation, DB structure and what the tables mean
HR: contact list, Document repository
My runner up (15 month ago) was free Deki_Wiki, time has passed, so I don't know if this would be still my runner up.
good luck!
I've also been investigating wiki software for use as a KB, but it is tricky to find something that is easy to use for non-technical people. There are many wikis that attempt to provide WYSIWYG editing, but most of the software I've found generates nasty inefficient html markup from the WYSIWYG editor.
One notable exception to this is Confluence which generates wiki syntax from a WYSIWYG editor. This still isn't perfect (show me a WYSIWYG editor that is) but is a pretty good compromise between retaining simple wiki syntax for those who like it and allowing non-technical users to contribute content. The only problem is that Confluence isn't free ($1,200 for 25 user license).
Edit: I also tried DekiWiki and while the UI is nice it doesn't seem to be quite ready for primetime (suffers terribly from the bad WYSIWYG output disease mentioned above). Also seems like they lack direction as there are so many different ways of accomplishing the same task.
Cerberus - it's more a full featured Help Desk/Issue Tracking system but it has a nice KB solution built in. It can be free but they do have a low cost pay version that is also very good.
Personally I use MediaWiki for this purpose. I've tried a number of other free and paid wikis (including Confluence) and have always been impressed with MediaWiki's simplicity and ease of use.
I have MediaWiki installed on a thumb drive (using XAMPP from PortableApps), which I use mostly as a personal knowledge base/code snippet repository. I can take it with me wherever I go, and view/edit it from any computer I'm using.
I think Drupal is a very possible choice. It has a lot of built-in support for book-type information capturing.
And there is a rich collection of user generated modules which you can use to enhance the features.
I think it has almost all the features you ask for out of the box.
Drupal CMS Benefits
We've been using a combination of
TWiki
OpenGrok for the codebase
usenet
LotusNotes based system
As long as there is a google search appliance pointed at these things I think it's ok to have any or many versions as long as people use them