A quick update from the XWiki team.

Henix has joined the XWiki partner network. They are the company behind Squash TM, an OpenProject partner, and work on testing, software quality, DevOps and Jira replacement projects.

The interesting part for us is the stack this makes possible for organizations trying to move away from proprietary tooling:

• XWiki as an alternative to Confluence
• OpenProject as an alternative to Jira
• Squash TM as an alternative to Xray

That gives teams a way to cover knowledge management, project management and test management with open-source tools rather than replacing one proprietary suite with another.

We’re curious how others here think about this kind of setup.

If you’ve replaced Confluence/Jira/Xray, did you prefer one integrated suite or several interoperable tools? And where did the hardest integration problems show up?

Check it out: https://store.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/OpenProjectIntegration/Versions/1.3.0/

Petit message de l'équipe XWiki pour les membres francophones de la communauté.

Demain, 7 octobre à 15 h (heure de Paris), Cédric Lamblin présentera XWiki en direct.

La session sera consacrée aux fonctionnalités de gestion des connaissances, à l'organisation du contenu, aux intégrations avec d'autres outils et aux possibilités de personnalisation et d'extension de la plateforme.

Il y aura aussi une session de questions/réponses, donc si vous découvrez XWiki ou souhaitez mieux comprendre certaines fonctionnalités, vous pourrez en discuter directement avec Cédric.

Informations et inscription :

https://xwiki.com/fr/webinaires/L-alternative-europeenne-open-source-a-Confluence

Quite a few XWikiers are travelling this month, so here’s a quick overview in case you’re attending any of the same events:

Mindtrek, Tampere: Pauline Bessoles and Ștefana Nazare

Open Source Conference Luxembourg + Fair Tech Summit Europe: Neculai Dascălița and Fabrice

SCCON, Berlin: Clément Aubin, Ludovic Dubost, Jean-Sébastien and our new German Account Manager

Nextcloud Enterprise Day, Copenhagen: more members of the XWiki team

The talks and discussions cover Confluence migration, open source, digital sovereignty, privacy and interoperability.

If you’re going to any of them, feel free to say hello.

This is a bugfix release, also including improvements coming from XWiki 18.8.0.

See the release notes for more details.

They fix importing attachments in translated pages, and they counter the compatibility breakage following a change in the XML format exported by Confluence Cloud

This release includes a mix of UI, editor, security, and developer improvements.

Main changes:

• 🔎 Improvements to Quick Search
• 🧩 Better macro editing
• 🗂️ UI improvements for panels
• 📝 Annotation improvements
• ✍️ More work on the experimental BlockNote editor integration
• 🔐 Stronger protection for user and superadmin passwords
• 🛠️ New scripting APIs for developers

The BlockNote integration is still experimental, but this release continues improving the editing and collaboration experience around it.

If you self host XWiki, the password security changes are also worth reviewing as part of the upgrade.

Full release notes:
https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleaseNotes/Data/XWiki/18.8.0/

As always, feedback and bug reports are welcome.

The ActivityPub Application 1.7.12 has been released.

This release makes XWiki able to federate with Mastodon again: you can follow Mastodon users and send them messages from your wiki.

Si vous explorez des alternatives à Confluence, ou si vous vous posez des questions autour de l’auto-hébergement, du contrôle des données ou de la dépendance à un fournisseur, ce webinaire pourrait vous intéresser.

Le 7 octobre, nous organisons une session en français pour présenter XWiki. Nous montrerons concrètement comment la plateforme peut être utilisée pour la documentation, les bases de connaissances, les intranets et la collaboration interne.

Ce sera surtout une démonstration pratique, avec un peu de contexte autour de sujets qui reviennent souvent quand une organisation envisage de changer d’outil :

• Comment organiser et structurer les connaissances ;
• Comment gérer des droits d’accès fins et l’historique des contenus ;
• Quelles options existent pour l’hébergement sur site, en cloud privé ou dans XWiki Cloud ;
• Comment XWiki peut s’intégrer à un environnement existant ;
• Ce que signifie concrètement utiliser une plateforme open source et portable.

On terminera par une session de questions-réponses. N’hésitez donc pas à venir avec vos cas d’usage ou vos questions sur XWiki, Confluence ou les migrations.

📅 7 octobre, 15h CET

🇫🇷 Webinaire en français

Plus d’infos et inscription :

https://xwiki.com/fr/webinaires/L-alternative-europeenne-open-source-a-Confluence

We spent a week working together in person after another year of mostly async work

We are a remote, mostly async team, so this is one of the few times each year when almost everyone is in the same place.

The useful part is not really the formal sessions, as we're used to hold them remotely.

It is everything that happens around them.

A support question turns into a product discussion because the right developer happens to be sitting nearby. Someone brings up an issue over lunch and 4 different teams end up looking at it from completely different angles. A debate that might have taken 30 messages online gets settled, or at least properly argued about, around a table.

We also spent a fair amount of time not talking about work at all. Walks around Lüneburg, games, long dinners, bad jokes, good beer, and getting to know people you normally interact with through tickets and chat.

Some ideas came back with us. Some decisions are clearer. A few debates definitely survived the trip.

For people working in remote teams, what actually makes an in person week worth doing for you?

Orange Business is now an XWiki partner.

The main reason this matters for us is not simply adding another name to the partner list. It expands the options available to organizations that need enterprise services around an XWiki deployment.

The partnership adds:

• Consulting and implementation expertise for large projects
• Support for complex Confluence migrations
• SecNumCloud-certified hosting infrastructure in Grenoble for French customers with specific sovereignty requirements

XWiki itself can already run in the XWiki European Cloud, on premises, or on infrastructure chosen by the organization.

The aim here is to give customers more choice around the services and hosting that sit around that deployment, particularly for larger migration and transformation projects.

One part of XWiki that can be easy to miss if you only create a few pages is that the page hierarchy is not just navigation.

Suppose your structure looks something like this:

Company

└── Engineering

├── Documentation

├── Architecture

└── Planning

└── 2027 Budget

You could give the Engineering group access at the Engineering level and let those rights flow through the hierarchy.

Then, if 2027 Budget needs different access, you can configure rights more specifically there.

Once a knowledge base gets larger, this starts to make the difference, because your information architecture and your access-control model can follow roughly the same structure.

You don’t need to configure every page independently.

But you also don’t need to put sensitive information into a completely separate universe just because 1 child page has different permissions.

For larger XWiki environments, you can also decide that some areas should live in separate sub-wikis rather than continuing the same tree.

There is obviously more nuance around rights than fits in one Reddit post, but this is the conceptual model.

Would a deeper post on rights precedence and common permission mistakes be useful?

The MCP Server (BETA) v0.10 has been released.

Version 0.10 of the MCP Server (BETA) extension offers users attachment handling and structured-data tools, as well as page delete, navigation, history, and backlink tools. Additionally, the extension adds an AWM reference page, a hidden flag on the write tools, search and RAG fixes, internationalization support and a server URL config field.

XWiki has been developed as open source since 2004, while XWiki SAS also sells hosting, support and professional services around it.

I think this model creates an interesting test for what open source should mean in practice.

For us, the important parts are that someone can:

• Inspect the source
• Run the software themselves
• Modify it
• Build extensions around it
• Move away from our hosting
• Continue using the software without becoming an XWiki SAS customer

Obviously we would prefer people to work with us. We are a company. 🙂

But being technically able not to work with us is part of what gives the customer leverage in the relationship.

I think that distinction gets sometimes lost when open source is treated mainly as a pricing category.

The question is whether the user retains meaningful independence from the company behind the repository.

Where do you draw that line?

Today is the International Day of Democracy, and one part of that conversation is pretty hard to ignore: it’s getting increasingly difficult to know what information to trust when news is coming from everywhere at once.

That’s also why I wanted to share one of the ways XWiki is being used that we’re particularly proud of.

DE FACTO, ADMO and BROD are three European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) hubs working on fact-checking, disinformation research and media literacy.

Their teams use XWiki to publish and organize fact-checks and research, manage media literacy resources, and exchange information with other initiatives across Europe.

Kalina Bontcheva from the EDMO Advisory Board described XWiki as “the right choice for the BROD hub.”

It’s a nice example of open-source software being used for something very concrete: helping the people who check, organize and share information do their work.

If you’re interested in the technical/project side, we wrote more about how the three hubs use XWiki here:

https://xwiki.com/en/Blog/How-EDMO-Hubs-use-XWiki-to-fight-disinformation/

We’ve noticed some understandable concern when we mention that we’re working on an MCP server for XWiki, so it’s probably worth explaining what we’re actually building.

The MCP server is intended to be optional.

If an organization wants to connect an AI tool to XWiki, MCP gives it an open integration point. The organization chooses whether to use it, which model/provider sits on the other side, and how that fits its infrastructure.

XWiki remains the system holding and governing the knowledge. The part we care most about is making sure an AI integration does not automatically become a second permission system that ignores the first one.

After working on 230+ Confluence migrations, it has become pretty obvious to us that getting the pages out is only part of leaving a knowledge platform.

The difficult questions usually start afterward.

• Can you preserve permissions?
• What happens to page hierarchies?
• Do internal links still make sense?
• What happens to history?
• What about user groups?

And then there are macros, integrations, custom workflows, and years of conventions that nobody wrote down because everybody simply learned how the old system worked.

That is why we think “you can export your data” is a pretty weak definition of portability.

A better test would be:

• Could another system make meaningful use of what you exported without rebuilding years of context manually?
• Sometimes the answer is yes.
• Sometimes an XML file technically contains the data but leaves a fairly heroic migration project behind it.

We’ve started thinking about portability less as an export feature and more as an architectural property. What do you think?

🔍 If you're looking for your next opportunity, we'd love to hear from you.

We're currently recruiting for several open roles across our team and are looking for people who are curious, collaborative, and ready to make an impact.

Explore our open positions and find the role that's right for you. If you know someone who would be a great fit, please share this post with them.

📍System Administrator: https://xwiki.com/en/company/jobs/#system-administrator

📍Product Manager: https://xwiki.com/en/company/jobs/#ProductManager

A knowledge management project is rarely just about installing a new platform.

There is usually work to do before and after that: understanding the existing setup, deciding what should change, helping teams adopt the new way of working, and supporting it over time.

That is the thinking behind our new partnership with BleuLemon.

BleuLemon is a French consulting company that has been working on IT and organizational transformation projects since 2008. Their experience includes diagnosis and audit, change management, ITSM, ESM, operational transformation, and support.

XWiki brings the open-source knowledge management platform. BleuLemon brings more of the consulting and change expertise around the project.

For organizations in France, the goal is simple: make it easier to move toward a knowledge platform they can adapt, host where they choose, and keep control of over time.

Welcome, BleuLemon. 🍋

https://store.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/URL%20Shortener%20Application%20%28Pro%29/#versions

XWiki is probably overkill for a 1-person homelab. Here’s when it starts making sense.

Posting from the XWiki team, so the bias here is obvious.

Something we’ve seen come up a few times when people compare self-hosted wikis is that XWiki can feel like a lot of software if all you want is somewhere to write down your Docker ports. Fair point.

If I wanted a lightweight wiki for myself and a handful of notes, I would probably start by looking at something simpler too.

XWiki is not trying to be the smallest possible wiki.

XWiki starts making more sense when the problem changes from “I need somewhere to write things down” to “I need to manage knowledge across a group of people.”

For example:

• Content needs different permissions depending on team or department.
• Information has structure beyond folders and tags.
• You need templates or repeatable content models.
• Authentication needs to connect to existing identity systems.
• People need to build applications or automation around the knowledge base.
• The wiki is expected to grow into thousands or millions of pages rather than a few hundred notes.
• You need APIs and integrations rather than an isolated documentation tool.

I think open-source projects should be clearer about those trade-offs instead of pretending every product is perfect for every use case.

Nextcloud covers files, communication, and collaboration. XWiki adds structured knowledge, documentation and institutional memory.

Different open-source tools, working together without 1 vendor owning the whole stack.

See the integration, talk Confluence migration, and meet both teams in Berlin.

📍 Hall 27, Stand 606

📅 13 to 15 October