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Comment by ssddanbrown | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on BookStack for over 6 years now, learning a lot about open source project maintainership during that time. Originally developed it while looking for a documentation system for my mixed-technical-skill workplace. Wanted something easy to use without having to get finance involved when increasing our user count.

With Confluence backing away from their self-hosted offerings, hopefully many will find BookStack useful. It's not supposed to be a direct replacement, and the design & content structure is quite opinionated, but it can serve many of the same use-cases as Confluence had served.

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Thank you, thank you, thank you. I use started using bookstack when I realized that I wanted a place for long form / long term storage of documents separates from my Notes / To dos. I love it and I deeply appreciate your hard work.

For others that haven't tried it, here's what clicked for me:

  - An opinionated hierarchy of Book -> Chapter (Optional) -> Page
  - Great search
  - WYSIWYG OR Markdown supported
  - Great integration into Diagrams.net

I love it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you! I love to hear about the specific features people enjoy.

> WYSIWYG OR Markdown

I will state that switching between them is pretty flaky at the moment, is done at instance level and can cause HTML in markdown. Is designed to be choose-once-and-leave. That said, in rebuilding the editor I am aiming for easy and instant Markdown & WYSIWYG switching within editor.

outline has a nice rich-markdown-text-editor package for react based apps in case you can re-use it!

I looked into the LaTeX support of it for a science editor projectg

Have you looked at Toast UI Editor (MIT license)?

https://ui.toast.com/tui-editor

I checked out a bunch of text editors on a past project and this one has worked very well as a WYSIWYG markdown editor.

Yeah, Got a list of potential options under review for our required criteria: https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/issues/2738

Obsidian integration would make me (and likelya bunch of its > 400k other users) happy!

Uhm that, integration with obsidian, kinda off topic as this is a standalone kB software and not an editor right?

Definitely not off topic. I do not use Obsidian but while Obsidian is a knowledge base software, I can absoslutely see the appeal of being able to organize your thoughts and notes into a full-fledged article and then push to something like Bookstack for public/team consumption.

Just on a practical level, you might as well just disable the option to convert, especially if you're going to swap it out anyway. Sometimes just flipping the switch on a task opens up a little cognitive space for the rest of your work. :)

Bookstack looks like an amazing feat of engineering — it’s overwhelmingly the wiki I want to deploy given other F/OSS options. just today I was showing it to a friend and it is impressive how clean and considered it is. Thanks for maintaining and improving this project

Thank you! This kind of feedback means a lot, provides the fuel to avoid burnout.

Impressive that you've stuck to it for more than six years. I remember testing an early version. Looks like you've made a lot of improvements in that time.

Thanks! I've learnt a lot in that six years. I've been quite proud of our constant, yet steady, pace of development while retaining upgrade compatibility (where possible).

I dove into your Laravel code the other day to see how you organized things.

Thanks for making it open so I could learn!

Happy to help! I will say that I would in no way present it as an example of a clean codebase. 6 years of weekend and night development, while having significant code understanding/learning during that time, has lead to somewhat of a mix of ideas and approaches. Constantly trying to re-align things though!

Totally makes sense!

there’s a lot to be learned in any event, since a lot of my projects are night/weekend ones too.

Perfectionists don't ship, take an extra slice of pie!

Funny to stumble on this thread just days after we started evaluating BookStack for internal use! Thanks for this piece of software. I'm really enjoying it so far and am looking forward to integrating it into our daily processes.

This is superb. Thanks for making this.

Looks like a good Notion alternative too.

We could potentially add passwordless MFA from saas pass to your project. Good luck with it.

That's cool. I recently built MFA into the access flow, with a sight to extend methods where needed, although any instance using the SAML/LDAP/OIDC auth options could enforce MFA on the identity provider side.

I apologize but may I know what you mean by "saas pass"?

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