Editing Wiki software (section)

=== Offline viewing and editing ===

Various approaches to providing wiki functionality when the user is not online have been tried. For users who need to simply read the wiki's content when offline, a copy of the content can often be made easily; in the case of Wikipedia, [[CD-ROM]]s and printed versions have been made of parts of Wikipedia's content.

Allowing offline editing, however (where the changes are synchronized when the user is back online), is a much more difficult process. One approach to doing this is using a [[distributed revision control system]] as a [[Front and back ends|backend]] of the wiki, in [[peer-to-peer]] style. With this approach, there is no central store of the wiki's content; instead, every user keeps a complete copy of the wiki locally, and the software handles merging and propagating of changes when they are made. This is the approach taken by the [[ikiwiki]] engine (which can use the distributed revision control system [[Git (software)|Git]] as its back-end), and [[Code Co-op]] (a distributed revision control system that includes a wiki component).