Dev-Wiki.de - The developers home
Dev-Wiki is a project dedicated to our German-speaking users. Feel free to participate using a translation service, but all content has to be German!
Dev-Wiki is a free knowledge platform for all topics around development and free software. It is a place to share ideas and gather feedback on them, ask programming questions and help others, learn programming, share your projects, build tutorials for programming in different languages for different operating systems, or the web, and talk about what's new in the free software world.
Given that the use of traditional forums declined over the last years, we want Dev-Wiki to be more than just a forum, like it used to be. We hope that you will find the broad set of topics and the big feature-set of the site interesting.
The sections of Dev-Wiki
Portal - Home of the platform
The portal is the home page of the platform, which gives you a quick introduction what the site is about, and a overview about recent Ikhaya articles. Furthermore, you find links to all other relevant sections here, you can manage your account and exchange private messages with other users.
Forum - Discussing things
The heart of Dev-Wiki is the forum where you can talk about anything related to development, free software and more. Don't know how to solve a problem in your project? The forum is here to help you! Have more experience in programming? Newcomers will be happy to read your replies. A forum is a place where ideas can be born and great friendships can be made. It's the heart of the community.
Wiki - Collecting and organizing knowledge
The brain of Dev-Wiki is the wiki, where we collect development knowledge in an organized way so that other users can profit from things discovered by others before. You can create tutorials how to program things in your favorite language, warn others about common mistakes or inform about the special cases on your favorite operating system. Something doesn't work for you? Go check the wiki, maybe someone else found a solution already. Other than forum posts, wiki articles are living documents that can be updated at any time, by anyone.
Ikhaya - A Blog for everybody
The Ikhaya is a collaborative blog where every user can contribute own articles. Want to show your new project or website? This is the right place to do so (only non-commercial stuff, please!). Found a project of someone else you find cool? Write about it, maybe something else will find it helpful as well. With many people participating, our Ikhaya can become something like a tech news site, but focused on free software. Wouldn't that be nice?
Planet - News from other places
The planet is a feed aggregator that shows interesting news from other blogs. Everyone can suggest to add blogs, but they need to be approved by us. We want to keep the focus here on free software and software development materials, as well. Also personal blogs of developers sharing their insights could be useful.
When it all started...
The original Dev-Wiki went online in December 2017, made by a 14 years old developer to replace the forum he used to participate in, since it was discontinued. Dev-Wiki wasn't an actual Wiki at that time, it was a forum built on the paid proprietary XenForo software, which caused that era to end some day, but more on that later. The old Dev-Wiki also had a chat and some community features, but it was never actively used in any other way than the chat with 3-4 people.
Dev-Wiki was the place where ideas were born and made into projects. Shortly after the start of Dev-Wiki, more services were added, and some day the GGC-Project was born. It's a collection of hosted, free to use open-source services that it still online to this day. Maybe it didn't change the world, but it was a important part of our lives at that time.
At the end of 2020, Dev-Wiki and GGC-Project officially became part of Nikisoft, who was involved since the first weeks of the project. The original founder left to take a break, but came back in 2025. We continued the Dev-Wiki forum for two more years after we took over, but had to make the hard decision to shut it down in December 2022, since the XenForo update license expired and keeping it online without security updates for even longer would have been like asking for trouble.
We have long searched for a suitable new software to build the new Dev-Wiki on, but didn't find one. We even tried building our own, but had to stop it due to lack of time and changed priorities. After Inyoka, the great software behind the ubuntuusers.de platform, was made open-source in 2024, we finally had a good software solution to start a new Dev-Wiki in 2025. And here it is now, waiting for you to join something that could become the next great developer community.
Dev-Wiki has always been a project of special importance to us. Growing up in a internet where forums about any possible topic had their prime time and so called "social media" platforms, whose social value can be questioned, weren't as popular as they are nowadays, we want to bring back what we miss from the good old days and think that it still has a place in the modern world. Fast-moving chats and closed-source walled-gardens are killing open knowledge. Let's take the time to move slower again, prefer long-form high-quality responses over fast quick&dirty answers and create knowledge that's worth preserving over generations.