Originally based on Ward's wikibase (wiki/1), but in a slightly different version: the "Wiki as straight perl" hack by OscarNierstrasz (I was mostly interested in flat ascii storage with RCS ability for version tracking), I then further tweaked the code for CSS styling and some other details. 

Some major reworking resulted in "clusterwiki", running many configurable wikis off a central library module. About then (1999/2000) I reconnected with Ward's own wiki developments as we got involved in writing a book together about ''TheWikiWay'', in part to promote a new public wiki base from Ward and suggest some standard implementations for new wikis.

Thus deeply into all the various possible features for the book, and influenced by the new Ward code, "clusterwiki" was rebuilt inside and out with a more thought-out feature set and some cool new hacks. Clusterwiki code became the base for production wiki hosting, easy to synchronize version upgrades across multiple websites (and later multiple servers).

Over the years, the clusterwiki codebase evolved through several "major" version rewrites, defined not so much by any great changes in functionality as such, but instead by refactoring passes to clean up the code and make the internal structure more consistent. The numbering came about to make server deployment easier, allowing public websites to run the established older version while I worked on newer -- sort of like the DebianLinux scheme of stable-testing-unstable distro. Symbolic linking made version shifts easy.

A rough guide major versions:
* wiki.lib -- the original proof-of-concept
* "wiki2.lib" -- essentially what I had after writing the book and incorporating the "cool hacks"
* wiki3.lib (when I started the numbering) -- user preferences, CSS, "wiki online adventure game"
* wiki4.lib (2005) -- rewrite to add consistent scaffolding for visual chrome using CSS by internal generation of suitable tags throughout, developing "wiki shopping-cart" code so that a wiki could be the CMS for an online webshop.
* wiki5.lib (2006) -- rewrite to fully incorporate the "wikishop" features (amazingly, codebase is still only 120 kbytes, upwards of half of which is comments)

Reference http://www.leuf.net/ww/wikiref is the (read-only) metawiki that documents the current codebase features.

--BoLeuf
----
CategoryInterWiki