= Welcome to Kwiki 2.0

Kwiki is wiki software that is especially popular in the Perl community.
It is of course written in Perl, but you don't need to be fluent in Perl
or even know what Perl is to start using a Kwiki wiki today.

One of the main advantages of Kwiki over other wiki software is that it
is comprised of lots of little software parts called plugins. There are
nearly 200 Kwiki plugins, with the number growing every day.

A plugin can change a Kwiki installation in any number of ways. The
effect can range from being simple as changing a color scheme to complex
as turning the wiki into a blog.

In practice, Kwiki installations end up looking and behaving very
different from each other, because a given installation is defined by
the set of plugins that the owner of the wiki is using.

There are plugins for almost anything you can think of, and even things
you probably haven't. If Kwiki doesn't have something you need, it isn't
too hard for you to write a plugin for yourself. Find a friendly Kwiki
hacker if you need help getting started.

== The Kwiki Vision

Kwiki is a great solution for those people who just want to install and
easily maintain a wiki site. But Kwiki is much more than that...

The vision of Kwiki is to be a software environment where
programmers can add to the framework as easily as a person would
edit a page on a wiki.

In an abstract sense, you can think of the Kwiki project as a wiki, and
each Kwiki plugin as a wiki page. Even though these plugins aren't open
for /everybody/ to edit, there is a strong sense of trust in the
community. Anyone who is interested (and generally trustworthy) can get
commit access to the project just by asking.

Kwiki encourages experimentation. No idea is too weird for Kwiki. There
are no inherent rules to follow. This makes Kwiki a hacker's playground.
Just be careful, or somebody might get an eye poked out.

Finally Kwiki doesn't make judgments on "Wiki Concepts". For instance,
Kwiki does not prefer CamelCaseLinks over [Free Links], or a file system
database over an RDBMS. Kwiki supports them all, with plugins for
everything. You could probably clone, say, MediaWiki (the Wikipedia wiki
software), using the right combination of Kwiki plugins.

The point is, if there is something about Kwiki that you don't
like, you don't need to convince the Kwiki community to change.
Just write a plugin!

