UseModWiki is a
wiki software written in
Perl and licensed under the
GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in
ordinary files, not in a
relational database
A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...
.
Wikipedias in English and many other languages were powered by UseModWiki
until switching to
MediaWiki.
History
After
Ward Cunningham created the first wiki website
WikiWikiWeb, there were various "WikiWikiClones" that implemented the functions and design of WikiWikiWeb's engine ("WikiBase"), mainly written in
Perl. Peter Merel developed
CVWiki which was an early WikiWikiClone released partially under the
GNU Lesser General Public License, and Markus Denker then developed
AtisWiki which was released under the
GNU General Public License and based on CVWiki.
In the 1990s, Clifford Adams initiated the Usenet Moderation project that would allow users to share rating, editing, and eventually summary/change information about
Usenet postings. It was replaced by the concept of
wikis in 1999, and the development of UseModWiki started on October 11 as a simplified
fork of AtisWiki. From version 0.4 ("WikiFour") in November 1999, more functions and improvements were introduced to UseModWiki.
In 2000, the second UseModWiki website
MeatballWiki was launched and hosted in usemod.com, along with the official website of UseModWiki.
In 2001, as Adams was both of the UseModWiki developer and a
Wikipedian
The Wikipedia community, collectively known colloquially as Wikipedians, is an informal community that volunteers to create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an '' Oxford Diction ...
, he brought many improvements for the usages of an encyclopedia to v0.91 and v0.92, especially "
free links" that uses double square-brackets (e.g.,
Wikipedia) as an option along with
camel case for linking to another page.
In September 2003, after two years of development, the release of version 1.0 introduced many new features including
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
,
RSS
RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...
, file uploads,
UTF-8, and more. Only bug fixing versions were released since that, and Markus Lude took over the project of UseModWiki from Adams in July 2007. The latest version was released in December 2017.
The wiki software for the
English Wikipedia was UseModWiki (phase I, retroactively) since the establishment on January 15, 2001, and as of January 2002, Wikipedias in 22 languages were powered by UseModWiki.
It was replaced by "
the PHP script" (phase II) on January 25, 2002, a new wiki software based on UseModWiki but rewritten in
PHP. On July 20, it was then replaced by its own rewritten wiki software (phase III), currently known as
MediaWiki, for the better performance and functionality.
Version history
See also
*
List of wiki engines
*
mw:MediaWiki history
References
*
External links
*
*
List of sites running UseModWikiIntroducing UseModWiki
{{Wiki software
1999 software
Cross-platform software
Free wiki software
Free software programmed in Perl
History of Wikipedia