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The Wiki Engine from CodePlex is now Open Source

Posted by Jonathan Allen on Aug 07, 2009

Sections: Architecture & Design,; Development,; Operations & Infrastructure
Topics: Open Source ,; Web Frameworks ,; .NET
Tags: Wiki ,; CodePlex ,; Content Management Systems

The Wiki rendering engine from Microsoft’s open source site, CodePlex, has been itself open sourced. Matt Hawley writes,

CodePlex previously had a decent wiki engine that was written eon's ago. On the average, that wiki engine worked relatively well, but had a very problematic performance bug that would cause rendering slowness occasionally. So, instead of attempting to fix the bug, we decided to re-write the entire thing with the intensions of making it available to everyone! This time, we chose a different approach for parsing the wiki markup (utilizing regular expressions) which has proven to give us a performance boost as well as a relatively simpler architecture!

In addition to basic formatting like lists and tables, WikiPlex has macros for embedding videos (Flash, QuickTime, YouTube, etc.), Silverlight components, and RSS feeds. For RSS feeds, up to 20 items can be displayed in either title-only or full contents mode.

As this is for a programmer’s site, WikiPlex also includes coloring for popular languages including VB, C#, SQL, PHP, CSS, and JavaScript.

WikiPlex is not a complete Wiki package. Developers using it in their own applications will have to build their own editing UI and a backend for storing pages. But this is also what makes it an ideal candidate for integrating with pre-existing websites.

WikiPlex is, of course, available on CodePlex.