Open-source Review Series There are a lot of great projects out there, but the time-consuming process of installing, configuring, and learning new systems with no guarantees the software can even support your use-cases can be a major source of friction. open-source The purpose of the open-source review series is to dive into different open-source projects so you as the reader can gain an understanding of the feature set and capabilities of different open-source software so you don’t have to spend time figuring it out yourself. BookStack — Documentation Management Platform We are taking a look at , a platform to manage your documents. It allows you to break your work down into three groups: books, chapters, and pages. This offers a very simple, yet powerful organization strategy. is an alternative to solutions such as Atlassian’s or other documentation platforms. BookStack BookStack Confluence View of a page in a book, navigation seen on the right. Project Overview — As of 12/2/2017 A platform to create documentation/wiki content built with PHP & Laravel — https://www.bookstackapp.com/ Repository — https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack Created By — ssddanbrown First Commit —July 12, 2015 Latest Commit — November 19, 2017 Number of Stars — 938 ( ) Click and ⭐️ this! Number of Commits — 804 Installation Method 1 — Manual Install : Follow these instructions Method 2 — Automated Install : Deploy BookStack on ServiceShop without a credit card Main Features Simple Document Management BookStack’s purpose is to attempt to simplify the process of organizing and managing your content. By forcing your content into Books, Chapters, and Pages, it gives you an organized overview of all your documentation, without the headache. You can add documents directly in the system with it’s WYSWIG editor and export to PDF/HTML/TXT with the click of a button. Powerful Searching Many platforms are hindered by poor searching tools. BookStack isn’t one of those. Powered by its simple architecture, BookStack’s searching is as comprehensive as you could ever want with a simple interface to boot. Filter by Page, chapter book, tag, date, and more. Searching allows for tags, dates, and type filtering White Label Customization BookStack offers the ability to brand and customize the application. The back-end also supports the ability to create custom HTML (for integrations like intercom) or CSS overrides if you don’t quite like the default theme. Integration Points LDAP is a protocol used to authenticate users and is a common solution for SSO (single sign-on), BookStack can use LDAP to authenticate users instead of it’s own database. LDAP Authentication — including Google, Twitter, Github, Facebook, Slack, and AzureAD. Social Login — BookStack supports logging in with many networks Social Login Capability User Management BookStack supports user registration and the ability to assign roles with different privileges (Viewer, Editor, Admin). Larger organizations will find this useful when they have many employees or interns creating, editing, and viewing the same content and they wish to limit what each user can do. BookStack has a powerful Role based access control system Who should consider using BookStack? I think BookStack is perfect for smaller businesses or freelancers that are looking for something extremely simple when it comes to documentation management. If you are looking for complex workflows and integrations with project management BookStack is not right for you. What BookStack is good for is adding some simple abstractions on top of your documentation which, in most cases does the job just as good as complex systems such as Confluence or MediaWiki. Conclusion BookStack offers a lot when it comes to simple documentation management. As it is actively maintained I look forward to see where this awesome open-source project is going to go. Try BookStack out and don’t forget to Star it on Github ! Click here to deploy BookStack on ServiceShop without a credit card instantly
