Stéphane Ducasse, Lukas Renggli, Roel Wuyts. SmallWiki: a meta-described collaborative content management system. In Dirk Riehle, editor, Proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis, 2005, San Diego, California, USA, October 16-18, 2005. pages 75-82, ACM, 2005. [doi]
Wikis are often implemented using string-based approaches to parse and generate their pages. While such approaches work well for simple wikis, they hamper the customization and adaptability of wikis to the variety of end-users when more sophisticated needs are required (i.e., different output formats, user-interfaces, wiki managment, security policies, …). In this paper we present SmallWiki, the second version of a fully object-oriented implementation of a wiki. SmallWiki is implemented with objects from the top to the bottom and it can be customized easily to accommodate new needs. In addition, SmallWiki is based on a powerful meta-description called Magritte that allows one to create user-interface elements declaratively.