dorfteich/docs/features.md

Dorfteich — what it is and why you might want it

Deutsche Fassung: docs/de/features.md

Dorfteich is an open-source wiki for people who want to think and write together — in real time, on their own server, without handing their knowledge to a cloud company.

The name means "village pond": the place where everyone in the village comes together. Your wiki is organized into ponds — one personal pond for every member, plus shared ponds for teams, clubs, families, or projects.

Writing together, live

• Real-time collaboration. Open the same page as a colleague and watch each other type — with named cursors and a presence strip showing who is on the page. No locking, no "someone else is editing" dialogs, no lost changes.
• Works offline. Keep typing when the connection drops; your edits merge back in automatically when you are online again.
• A friendly editor. Headings, lists, task lists, tables, quotes, code blocks, and images — with full Markdown round-trip: what you write can always leave the system as clean Markdown again.
• Wikilinks. Type [[page-name]] to link pages. Links to pages that do not exist yet are collected for you, one click creates them. Backlinks show you where every page is referenced.

Never lose anything

• Version history. Every page keeps automatic snapshots plus named versions you save yourself. Compare, see who contributed, and restore any earlier state — restores are visible live in every open editor.
• Trash with a grace period. Deleted pages sit in a per-pond trash and can be restored for weeks before they are purged.
• Real backups. Nightly database + file backups, optional off-host copies to any Nextcloud you control, and a tested one-click restore — including a documented path to rebuild an instance from nothing.

Organize the way you think

• Page tree: nest pages under pages (up to 6 levels) — slugs and links stay flat, so moving a page never breaks anything; the ZIP export also stays flat (the hierarchy is organizational only)
• Obsidian vault import: a pond admin uploads a whole vault as a ZIP — folders become the page tree, tags become labels, [[wikilinks]] are rewritten so they keep working, and images come along as pond files
• Dead links are one click from a page: opening a link to a page that does not exist yet offers to create it right there
• Knowledge graph: an interactive map of every pond — pages as nodes, wikilinks as edges, missing targets as dashed phantoms you can create with a click; each page also gets a local neighborhood graph
• Labels, hierarchical if you like, to slice a pond any way you want — and to scope access rules (see below).
• Fast full-text search across everything you may read — accent- and umlaut-insensitive, with substring matching.
• A table of contents, page indexes, diagrams and more through built-in plugins (see "Extensible" below).

Share exactly as much as you want

• Fine-grained permissions. Grant read or write access per pond, per label, or per page — to individual people, to all signed-in members, or to the public internet. Deny rules carve out exceptions. A built-in inspector explains why someone can or cannot see a page.
• Public pages. Publish selected pages read-only to the world, with clean URLs — the rest of the pond stays private.
• Comments. Discuss in threads next to the content, resolve what is settled, and choose per pond whether every reader or only editors may comment.
• Notifications you control. Watch pages or whole ponds, get an in-app inbox, and choose e-mail digests (hourly, daily, or off) with a working unsubscribe link.

Your documents come and go freely

• Import Word (.docx), LibreOffice (.odt), and Markdown files — including embedded images.
• Export any page as Markdown, Word, LibreOffice, or PDF (with your pond's typography), and any pond as a ZIP of Markdown files. No lock-in, ever.

Machines are welcome too — on your terms

• REST API. A clean, token-authenticated public API to read, write, search, label, and comment — with an OpenAPI description. Tokens carry exactly the permissions of their owner, never more.
• Built-in MCP endpoint. Connect Claude Code or any MCP-capable AI assistant directly to your wiki — it can search, read, and (if you allow it) write pages. Both interfaces are off by default and each pond opts in separately.

Extensible, but safely

• Plugins add block types (Mermaid diagrams, full draw.io editing), page tools (table of contents, page index), and section styles. Every plugin runs in a strict sandbox: no cookies, no storage, no network — it cannot read more than the person looking at it.
• Reference plugins ship with the product and double as documented examples for writing your own.

Private by design

• Self-hosted. One docker compose up, a friendly first-run wizard, and it is yours. Everything — fonts included — is served from your own domain: pages make zero requests to third parties.
• GDPR-friendly. Imprint and privacy-policy pages built in (with templates), personal data export as ZIP, account deletion with content-preserving pseudonymization, and an audit trail of administrative actions.
• Bilingual. The entire interface speaks German and English; every user picks their language.

Honest operations

• Health endpoints that distinguish "down" from "degraded", an admin system panel with job status, backup state, audit log and storage overview, monthly automated restore drills — the operator can prove the backups work, not just hope.

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Dorfteich is MIT-licensed open source. If you can run Docker, you can run Dorfteich — see self-hosting.