Talking points:
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Wikipedia is something everyone loves.
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Jimmy wales had a pretty ambitious goal to essentially document and make a large sum of human knowledge available for the world to view, and contribute to.
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It started with MediaWiki, a system created by the Wikimedia Foundation specifically to run Wikipedia.
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It has become very sophisticated since then, and they don’t really run it on a single server anymore. They’ve got all sorts of proxies routing and balancing requests. Nginx is used as the termination proxy. And they use a hacked up version of PHP called HHVM, developed by Facebook to manage their PHP load.
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A pretty big feat for a relatively small organization.
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I challenged myself to build a full modern web application like Wikipedia on fully open source software.
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It runs on an object oriented MVC framework called Laravel, released under the MIT License
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It runs on a debian linux server – several licenses that follow the Debian Free Software Guidelines
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There’s a lot of other things under the MIT license.
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Everything goes through the page model, which controls data flow between the application and database.
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Takeaways:
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There is so much open source software available to help you do just about everything.
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MediaWiki is a complex system.
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