Sputnik is a content management system designed for extensibility. It works as a wiki out of the box, but can be extended into other things.

Sputnik Is a Wiki

Out of the box Sputnik behaves like an easy to use and full-featured wiki that can be used "as is". It offers editable nodes, history and diff, user accounts with optional email validation, a flexible permission system, RSS feeds, etc. (See Features for more information.) This site is running Sputnik. (The most recent version, in fact.) You can click around for a demo, or edit the Sandbox. Or go to Installation to set up your own. Or ask us to host it for you.

Sputnik is easy to install. You can set it up on shared hosting such as Dreamhost. (See Deployment for other options.) You can install it under 5 minutes. In particular, you do not need to have Lua installed and you do not need root access to the machine. It has been known to work on Windows too. Did we mention that we can host it for you?

Sputnik supports access control and you can change the templates. You can use it to run a personal site that doesn't look like a wiki and that only you can edit.

Sputnik Is an Extensible Wiki

However, Sputnik was designed to be extended. It offers many options out of the box, and it is easy to add more. You can surely change the way Sputnik looks — see some of the examples in Sightings. But you can also do much more.

For example, Sputnik stores its data as plain files on disk by default, but you if you prefer, it can store them in a git repository, in a database or in subversion repository. Or, you can write your own storage plugin. (See Configuration for more information.) Sputnik uses LuaRocks for package management which makes it easy to install any available plugins.

Sputnik Is Whatever You Want It to Be

Sputnik can also be used as a platform for a wide range of "social software" applications. A few extra templates and perhaps a few lines of Lua code can turn it into a bug tracker, a photo album, a blog, a calendar, a mailing list viewer, or almost anything else. (See Demos for some examples.) So, you can think of it as a content-management system or a web platform of sorts. See Concepts for more information.