SWiki, a simple standalone wiki

So yesterday evening I wanted to write some technical/design documentation for a little pet project of mine. However, I did not really know what to choose. On one side, I want something like a Word document that offers formatting and some references/Table of Contents. On the other hand, long Word documents tend to become messy and sometimes a bit hard to maintain, especially since Word has all those nice little Helpers that just love to mess up formatting in my document (Funny but unrelated sidenote: If you happen to have a german Windows 2000 Server manual at hand, witness how they are constantly talking about DIE Controllers instead of IDE Controllers thanks to Words Auto-Correction).

So ideally I want something like a Wiki: Rudimentary but solid and easy formatting, no black auto-correction magic that gets in my way, and a nice document outline. The problem with MediaWiki is that it requires a webserver and MySQL database, which is a bit heavyweight. I looked at alternatives and found ScrewTurn Wiki Desktop Edition which sadly requires installation, and TiddlyWiki which looks great at first, but somehow I've lost my data twice, possibly by not saving even though AutoSave is ticked. I don't know, maybe I am just not smart enough to use it, but I did not like it.

At the end, I decided to roll my own thing, called SWiki. SWiki is a simple, standalone wiki. At it's core, it's a SQLite database, using WikiPlex as it's WikiParser and the C# WebBrowser Control as an integrated Browser. No installation required, only .net Framework 3.5 SP1 needs to be installed. It's Open Source and Version 0.8 can be downloaded on CodePlex.

It may not be the most impressive software ever written, but hey, I've written this for me after all 🙂

SWiki 0.8

SWiki 0.8

Comments (6)

seanAugust 16th, 2009 at 08:14

cool, looks promissing

though it would be nice some option to change the default font, and the background color.
the font is quite big. the gray background makes the typography less readable

mstumAugust 16th, 2009 at 14:32

Thanks. Changes to the Look of the pages is planned for 0.14, the version after the next one. That basically allows modifying the CSS that is used for rendering the pages and that allows complete customization of Colors, Fonts, Sizes etc.

[...] few weeks ago I started a WinForms application, which is my first foray into a real WinForms application (I have written some before, but those [...]

bcOctober 4th, 2009 at 14:38

So, there's no relation to the already existing Swiki wiki software?
http://wiki.squeak.org/swiki/

Confusing.

mstumOctober 4th, 2009 at 17:18

No, there is no connection, hence I'll rename SWiki in the next Version (~November)

Not Rocket Science » Re-Thinking SWikiFebruary 1st, 2010 at 17:32

[...] behind it, I was remembering that I tried to create a better Wiki System a few months back with SWiki. Now SWiki is nice in theory, but I think I made some fundamentally wrong decisions in it's scope [...]