Show HN: Etherpad meets Markdown for a minimal company wiki | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Etherpad meets Markdown for a minimal company wiki

enterprisewiki.co

56 pointsakrymski63 comments

I appreciate what you've done here, but when I hear the words "enterprise wiki" (as your URL implies) and you can't paste MS Word formatted text into it, I feel a disconnect. I'm not saying that is how it should work, or is a feature that I would like, but if you approach an enterprise with this and explained that they would have to use something called Markdown to update it, they would laugh in your face. Most, if not all, non-technical users of software do not want to (or simply cannot) write markup in any form.

Nice work, though. I really like it.

Sorry for the URL - admittedly we didn't spend long on it :)

I have a issue with the name. Why not call it markdownwiki instead of enterprise wiki. Immediately I know what your wiki is and does. Good work on the execution though.

Thanks for your feedback. We've built it for ourselves initially, didn't give the name much thought. Will have to see where it goes.

I've been looking for a really nice simple wiki, but targeting the business market with no security besides a URL with a guid isn't going to cut it.

the URL is random so it's harder to crack than a password, but you're right - we'll be adding proper 'accounts' later, and some more features if necessary - it's an MVP at this stage.

This looks great and I love the ease of use, however I just can't use it yet. I could spend a lot of time putting info into this but there's no question if it will be gone any day. For me to trust it enough to use it, I either need to be able to install it to my own server or want to pay for it.

You should really add a minimal homepage with an email signup as well if you intend to work on this more. The product is self explanatory so I don't need marketing text but I'd love to be able to be notified if you come out with accounts, open-source it, add a paid plan or allow installs to my server.

All in all, great work and congrats on shipping something!

Thanks, we've built it for ourselves and wanted to see if anyone else would be interested first. Would happily add accounts and charge a small subscription fee for it. How many dollars per month would it be worth to you?)

I'm interested in it as a library or an open source tool that I can integrate, but as a paid product, I believe it falls a little bit short of an MVP.

What's unique about what you have here is the realtime collaborative editing. We use NestaCMS (which also understands Markdown) hooked up to a Dropbox folder in a few places. The functionality is similar, but there's no in-page editor, and we can't collaborate in real time.

Both of those things have value to me, but I have serious reservations about jumping on to a wiki product that I can't control. Documentation is a complete pain in the ass. When I put time in to it, I need to feel 100% confident that I won't have to abandon it at a future date; either because I run up against a feature ceiling, or because you disappear. And if I do have to leave, I need to be able to get my information out of the system.

That's tough to answer (pricing is tough!). As a single consumer, not much (e.g. under $20/month). As a business, potentially a lot more. If you're actually marketing it to enterprise or at least company teams, they're budget (and features they'd require) are different.

Oh and we just added a link to an email signup in the text:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDdGcHE...

Very cool!

I was a bit frustrated by not being able to select text when in "view" mode (text selection worked fine in markdown mode - using latest version of Chrome on a mac). Is this a side effect of the iOS shortcuts?

ha, thanks for spotting that bug, yeah its the gesture library causing issues ... fixed now.

I confirm text selection is working fine for me now - in Chrome.

Nope...same here with Chrome on Ubuntu 12.10.

Agreed, that is probably a dealbreaker if you can't copy and paste things from a wiki, especially commands or code snippets in an enterprise environment ;) Plus, definitely needs to be downloadable and installable internally for this to gain any traction!

I was fighting against making the same comment, since it's kind of a weird thing that I do when viewing a web page is to repeatedly select the block of text I'm reading.

Whenever people are looking over my shoulder, they always seem annoyed by my doing it, so I figure I'm unique in that regard, but I'm glad somebody pointed it out.

It's not weird... lots of people do it. I do it to keep track of where I'm reading...

There was actually a HN Poll about it a little while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4839436

Nice. Good job reducing UI and common interactions to a minimum. The auto-updating structure on the left also encourages a proper hierarchy for the document.

I want it. Where do I go?

I want to know more about it also. It's weird, I tried going to the homepage and I just get redirected back to the linked wiki.

It's almost like they don't want customers

thanks for the comment! You don't need to go anywhere - it creates a random URL for you so you can just edit the wiki and bookmark it.

At this point its an MVP - if people like it we'll add more features :)

I'm having a problem toggling back and forth with [esc].

I am using Safari 5.1.7 ... hitting esc always toggles it from normal to markdown mode, but toggling back to normal is difficult ... I have to click around in the different panes a few times and keep hitting escape, and eventually one of them will work.

Is it indeed supposed to toggle back and forth with escape, pressed once, regardless of which pane your mouse is in ?

sorry, fixed

thanks - it appears to work now.

I think the esc key toggling is a fantastic idea.

I was just about to switch my wiki platform to vimwiki, but this is making me rethink that...

This is due to a bug/weirdness with how Safari deals with using the ESC key for a hotkey with javascript.

Safari actually fires key events for the escape key hundreds of times per second.

This can cause some unexpected behavior if you don't do some clever javascript to handle this bug.

I came here to comment on the same issue - hitting escape to edit will work for the first toggle, but afterwards to say 'i'm done editing' the key handler gets called too many times and the markdown flickers on and off like crazy.

Also: escape is not really a normal key for 'edit this text'. It would be better to put an explicit 'edit' link, it's more understandable for your users.

Overall though I like how simple it is, and love the use of Markdown.

ESC is used to exit a mode in VI. So it could be good for "I'm doing editing this text" in that sense.

Can you enable slashes in keys? It would be nice to get subpages by adding a link to enterprisewiki.co/wiki/myguid/somepage from my wiki. Still secret, but much better for organization, and you can add it with one trivial change.

great idea, will do today

meanwhile you can use /wiki/password-page-name

The one thing I believe that all collaborative editors need is accountability for edits. It would be great if you can build a simple sign-in and track all operations based on which user is committing them. Then you can do some neat things like rolling back the document in time, or just removing the edits of certain users. Just a thought.

I love the idea of a collaborative and intuitive web-based editor that works on mobile platforms. Nice work!

sure, that's coming in the future

This is amazing, I would totally use it to keep quick notes and ideas. The escape key toggle between markdown and formatted text is my favorite feature.

Is this something we can purchase and self host ? Or is this something you plan to make available only as a hosted wiki service ?

It's a hosted service, we have no plans for a downloadable version for now.

I wish for something like this + https://telegr.am/ :)

With Telegr.am I could do most of the edits locally and check it in to GitHub.

With this I could do small adjustments, changes while at the customer etc. and still have the full history archived in GitHub.

Love the execution. Would be great if it could have history snapshots in a git-style. I'm looking to replace my github-hosted markdown docs (fairly numerable # of files), and this looks awesome, just needs to feel more solid. would love to help develop it!

This is gorgeous. We've been looking for something like this. I'd use this for our company as soon as you

- support google apps authentication - allow us to pay for it (I don't trust free services)

Thanks! How many dollars per month would you pay for something like this?)

(I'm a different user)

For a reliable universal private notepad like this, I'd pay $2 per month. That sounds cheap, but I'm talking personal use, not business.

Thats great! What features in particular excite you? As a personal user my guess is you don't care much about collaboration, but more about security & mobile access?

This is pretty sweet, it's a shame it doesn't appear to be open source.

We may open source it later if we have time to clean up the code :)

I think we all would like non-clean and open source, compared to nothing :)

Absolutely agree. Other users might even help clean it up and expand it.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4934235

Open source would be awesome, particularly because I really want to use this for a personal website. I have a feeling that that's probably not a use case I'd be happy with if I couldn't get in and modify things.

Yes, I feel the exact same way. There are specific functionalities that I would need.

Dokuwiki is a Free / open source Collaborative Wiki

Etherpad has various Wiki functionality available by enabling plugins

Etherpad also has WikiMedia/Wordpress etc. integration

Cool! What are your concepts for implementing SSO, I18N, L10N, RBAC and maybe any kind of (automated) workflow management? It´s enterprise, isn´t it?

Heads up: scrolling on my Nexus 7 is horrific. I wonder if it's some javascript issue.

EDIT: forgot to specify I'm using Chrome as the browser

Good stuff! Now if only someone were to implement something like this as a front-end to editing Github's README.md files.

I like what you're doing here. It looks very simple and clean and I like that there's keyboard control with esc.

Etherpad clones tend to go away, not sure what it is about them. How do we know you'll stick around?

It's an mvp at this stage, if we introduce paid plans we'll stick around :) For now we're using it ourselves if that's any consolation

Looks neat!

What tech stack are you using on this?

thanks! node.js

Any JS frameworks? Are you using Etherpad Lite?

  curl -O http://enterprisewiki.co/bin/app.min.js
  uglify -b | vim -

Looks like they're using Showdown for Markdown functionality, sharejs for concurrent editing, node-browserchannel for async communication... Or, maybe Closure's BrowserChannel?

I would love to see an end-to-end "here's how we built this" blog post for this kind of project. Very nicely done!

I'm very excited about fixing wikis, and I'm really impressed to see that OP has some very similar ideas about it.

Because of this, I found it worthwhile to burn 1-2 hours to de-minify his Javascript, which mostly required figuring out what all his inlined JS libs are.

https://gist.github.com/4321959

To save you a click, here are the JS files he uses:

https://github.com/EightMedia/hammer.js/blob/master/jquery.h...

http://code.google.com/p/rangyinputs/source/browse/trunk/jqu...

https://github.com/jeresig/jquery.hotkeys/blob/master/jquery...

https://github.com/EightMedia/hammer.js/blob/master/hammer.j...

Modified version of http://code.google.com/p/jquery-elastic/source/browse/trunk/...

http://code.google.com/p/webapptools/source/browse/trunk/wat...

https://github.com/coreyti/showdown/blob/master/src/showdown...

https://github.com/coreyti/showdown/blob/master/src/extensio...

http://sharejs.org/channel/bcsocket.js

http://sharejs.org/share/share.js

http://sharejs.org/share/textarea.js

you could have just asked :) see the post below - it outlines the libs used, the rest probably aren't the best choices anyhow, took 2 days to put this together so it's hardly an example to follow :)

share.js (and its dependencies - redis, socket.io), prettify, showdown, etc. it's really simple, not much to write-up I'm afraid :)

Small bug: The markdown editing textarea is not full width on Firefox, it's very narrow. Works fine in Chrome though.

Same with IE10.

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