KnowledgeTree Blog

Open Source in Action at the KnowledgeTree Forge

In a 2006 Optaros white paper (Seth Gotlieb and Sebastian Wohlrapp, ‘Unleashing the Power of Open Source in Document Management‘. Optaros, March 17, 2006), the authors refer to “… the state of information chaos in many organizations”. Citing the opportunities for Open Source, the authors state that “… document management is a ‘horizontal’ solution, basically the same business requirements apply regardless of industry or size of companies.”

Why are we telling you this? Well, every day, the KnowledgeTree team works hard to deliver build after build of leading edge document management solutions that serve the two, equally important pillars of our Open Source development and business model - our vibrant Open Source community, and a growing list of satisfied Commercial customers.

While we’re passionate about the free and dynamic spirit of Open Source, the power and continuity of KnowledgeTree’s Open Source Document Management System resides with You, the Open Source community.

Getting You involved is a huge part of our mission, so this month, we’re turning the spotlight on the KnowledgeTree Forge - a community resource and collaborative space where we you can help us build the best Open Source document management system in the world. Ambitious? Why not? Most companies need a special breed of document management, and your contributions can make it happen. Everyone Benefits.

The KnowledgeTree Forge is the repository for community-contributed Plugins (see the Plugins Index and descriptions on the KnowledgeTree Community Wiki). This is the place to download language packs that translate your system into over 20 languages. Some of these are works in progress, but at least you won’t have to start from scratch. Our top project this month is the German Language pack, which has been downloaded nearly 8000 times! Well done to Christian, Hannes, Marcus, Mark, Stefan, and Stephan for your good work.

If the language packs aren’t your thing, you may want to check out the archive of code snippets that others have added back to the project. Contributing back to the project - through Plugins or code - may get your cool features added to the core, so that your future maintenance and upgrade overhead is reduced. Everyone Benefits.

To encourage your involvement, we have a growing set of Developer Documentation, including advice on creating language packs and contributing to KnowledgeTree. We’re hoping to get more of these Tutorials, which reduce the learning curve and help maintain best practice coding standards, and the User Forums are always a good place to openly observe the development process.

The openness of the code means anyone can analyze it to understand how it works, and you can change the system to suit your requirements, and build other applications based on it.
Hopefully, you’ll share your brilliance by adding your projects and tutorials to the Forge.

Carolyn