Since the beginning of Wikidot it has been growing evolutionarily and became a stable, popular and powerful collaboration and publishing platform. Today I would like share an idea that hopefully could take Wikidot one step ahead.
In the beginning, as opposed to traditional "wiki" collaboration software, which required dedicated software (and often hardware) for each site, Wikidot offered a way to quickly set up multiple sites. As a Wikidot user you can create one, five, or even fifty sites and they are set up automatically.
Now imagine this: how about automatically creating not a single site, but a whole Wikidot-style service? Let me introduce:
Wikidot Clusters!
The shortest explanation of a cluster is: an isolated set of sites and users, separated from the shared environment of Wikidot. Actually it would work as a Wikidot instance just for you.
Indeed many users asked us about having a private, managed Wikidot installation. Just like the Wikidot service but limited to a single company, group or school. For most of these needs, clusters would be the way to go.
Control and management
Owning a cluster means much control. Cluster admins could create, edit, remove users and sites, run reports — and have more or less the same permissions we — the Wikidot Team — have over the current Wikidot.
Customization
Clusters could be customized — login screens, email templates, themes. You could style it to match the style of your company or organization.
You could also set the base domain so that all your cluster sites and data would be by default in this domain. E.g. site1.<your-domain-goes-here>.com, site2.<your-domain-goes-here>.com etc.
Isolation
But the most important thing is isolation. While using Wikidot.com works great for bloggers, gamers, multiple communities, schools and companies, we receive many signals that for many companies and organizations the shared environment like Wikidot.com is (unfortunately) not acceptable. With clusters, you get your own virtual space without any interference with Wikidot.com, and you have full control over it.
Security and performance
Clusters will be running on Wikidot software — the same that we have been improving for the last years.
The idea of Wikidot Clusters has been bugging us for the last two years, so it is not something new that we invented last night. What is more, we see it as a next step for Wikidot, and would be a great new thing to work on in 2011.
At this point, are really curious about your opinions!
Without digressing too much from the subject, would having a Wikidot cluster mean the potential to change Wikidot code? For example, creating nestable modules.
λ James Kanjo
Blog | Wikidot Expert | λ and Proud
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Fantastic idea! Do I understand that you will still be hosting these clusters? Or, would we be able to run it on our own hardware or install it on our web hosting service? What happens to WikidotOS?
As an admin of a cluster, I would want to be able to use external tools/apps for things like querying the database or adding users in bulk like I can do with the open source version. Will that kind of thing be possible?
Being able to isolate and better "brand" a collection of sites has great appeal to me for use in our business. Even though I've been very happy with WDOS at work for a few years now, it's been frustrating that it's lagging so far behind the current Wikidot feature set. If clusters become a reality, is it safe to assume that the update process for new features will be relatively easy and painless?
Community Admin
We plan having tools to create sites and users by cluster admins. CSV import of users would be one of those. The easiest way to automatically create accounts for all your customers: download CSV template, open in Excel for example, paste data from other database, export to CSV again, load it to Wikidot, wait 5 minutes and have your users created (and maybe even mailed their new passwords, unless you supply them in CSV).
Wikidot OS mistake was that it's a separate project. Based on the original code, but forked and not synchronized. We plan adding the cluster features to Wikidot code, the one that Wikidot.com runs, so everything possible at Wikidot.com would be instantly possible to clusters. Bugfixes included. You can simply think of everything Wikidot.com is now as just one of many clusters — probably the biggest one though ;-) — in the future.
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
I would love love love this. I run a bunch of wikis for an educational institution. We tried to set up our own farm with the open source code but it was way too buggy. This would actually be even better than that since we would not necessarily have the best capacity for hosting.
When might you institute this? The sooner the better! I am sure I could get other educational institutions interested as well if this comes to pass.
Our plan is to get this working as soon as possible without any "added features" and then to gradually add features like the above-mentioned central users management, cluster configuration and other useful things. We do believe educational institutions are a typical use-case for wiki clusters (the other one would be companies' wiki space, think farm of the following sites: official company site, workers' blogs, customer relationship sites, internal issue tracker, knowledge database and a support site).
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
I can't wait till this is out! Will there be tutorials? Will there be options in your account settings or the admin:manage page?
Edit: This would be great for the PS3 Index
CEO of Icon Deposit
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Really awesome! I think this would be another great resource for people to tap into! I'd like to see this implemented.
Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.
This is a very nice idea. I'm just curious how separate this is from the actual wikidot server.
Also, WikidotOS?
OS = open source… not operating system ;-)
~ Shane (Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer)
Wikidot: My Blog, Wikidot Editor, Official Docs
Work: ZoomPlanner (built for freelancers/small business)
Other: YouTube (gaming channel)
I think an answer to one of Ed's questions fits yours as well:
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
I am glad you people like the idea so far! I do not want to promise any deadlines, but I am sure Clusters will be one of our main goals in 2011. We need to move forward!
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
This should benefit projects that have a decent amount of organizational structure that run both horizontally & vertically for a given project.
This will benefit corporate environments right from the get go as well as groups managing multiple projects at once yet at the same time allowing them to share data/communication to be leveraged between projects.
Kudos to the team for tackling a solution to another need.
This presumably means that we will be able to run Wikidot-based intranets within corporate IT environments. If so I really really like this idea.
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
That's fantastic news, guys! I've been looking forward to something like this for years now.
With clusters, would I be able to integrate my currently-existing sites? I always wanted my sites to share tags, users, etc.; for instance, being able to use cross-site ListPages, cross-site Backlinks, etc.
To be more concrete, I have two sites which I'd like to integrate this way:
http://biblio.etnolinguistica.org
and
http://www.etnolinguistica.org
I'd like to keep them as separate sites, but sharing things such as tags, list pages, etc. Would that be possible once clusters are implemented?
Eduardo R. Ribeiro
http://www.etnolinguistica.org
Added features: at first, clusters would be just the matter of isolation from other Wikidot.com sites (no fancy cross-site features added). Cross-site features may be added later (they could be enabled on per-cluster settings, cause due to security issues, they don't really make sense at current sites on wikidot.com).
Convert to cluster: we do plan having feature to "get chosen sites and convert them to wiki cluster". Users and sites would be cloned. Old sites would become redirects to new ones on the cluster.
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
Clusters apart, what if cross-site features were enabled on a per-MA basis? I guess there would be no security issues if only sites belonging to the same MA were allowed to share each other's contents.
Of course, I have no idea how technically complicated that would be :)
Eduardo R. Ribeiro
http://www.etnolinguistica.org
I made a wish for this a while ago: http://feedback.wikidot.com/wish:466
I agree this would be a great option regardless of where it works into the cluster discussion.
Community Admin