melmothX

Happy winter solstice, Perl community!

After almost 3 years of development and more than 2 years in production, 2 talks at YAPC::EU (Granada and Cluj) and one talk at the Dancer conference last year in Vienna, I think it's time to announce Amusewiki on blogs. perl.org as well, as I consider it more or less feature complete and robust enough for a larger audience.

Amusewiki is basically a CMS, but it's not "yet another one". Its main feature is that it creates for each published text various PDF (via LaTeX) and EPUB (for e-readers and mobile devices) files, along with an HTML version. It's also able to produce slides. Also the bookbuilder provides a way to extract, merge and customize the texts stored in the archive. You may want to give amusewiki a try if you're interested in publishing and distributing texts. If you just need a wiki or a blog for posting code snippets and lolcats, you probably want to look elsewhere. Amusewiki is suitable for publishing whole books as well.

The storage engine is powered by Git and the archiving is completely decoupled from the front-end. The search engine is powered by Xapian.

The web application itself runs on Catalyst + Template Toolkit + DBIC and has a large set of tests for safe development.

The sources are (of course) freely available at github. The github bugtracker is the preferred way to post feature requests and bug reports.

Debian packages for a trouble-free installation are available at http://packages.amusewiki.org/

There is a sandbox site, if you want to try out the publishing procedure.

CPAN packages written and released for this project (markup parsers, PDF postprocessing and a OPDS producer).

• PDF::Imposition (general purpose)
• PDF::Cropmarks (general purpose)
• Text::Amuse
• Text::Amuse::Compile
• Text::Amuse::Preprocessor
• XML::OPDS (general purpose)

There are about twenty live sites running amusewiki in the wild, with a total of a few thousands of texts, from articles, to technical documentation, to whole books.

More information and documentation can be found at the amusewiki homepage.

So, again, happy winter!