Basilar

A knowledge base is, in its simplest form, a structured store of what an organisation knows — documentation, procedures, reference material, and the accumulated record of decisions made and problems solved. The value of such a system is proportional to how consistently it is used and how reliably it can be queried; a knowledge base that fragments across tools, or that depends on the discipline of individual contributors to remain coherent, tends toward entropy rather than utility.

What is less often acknowledged is that the choice of platform is not neutral. Most knowledge systems are built around the assumption that information flows downward — that someone decides what is documented, in what form, and who may see it. This produces systems that are orderly in appearance and brittle in practice, because the people closest to the work are rarely the ones with the access or the incentive to keep them current. The knowledge that actually drives an organisation — the reasoning behind decisions, the lessons that did not make it into the report, the context that makes a procedure legible — tends to live outside such systems entirely.

Basilar is the platform on which this knowledge base runs, and its design reflects a different set of assumptions. Each page is a flat file, independent of database infrastructure, which means the system is portable, recoverable, and readable without specialist maintenance. Access controls operate at the page and group level natively, so the same installation holds private notes, shared working documents, and open reference material within a single coherent structure — not through workarounds, but by design. A person working alone can use it as a personal knowledge system. A small team can use it as a shared working surface. A larger organisation can use it to hold the full complexity of what it knows, with the boundaries between open and private drawn precisely where they are needed.

This matters because knowledge does not respect organisational charts. The person with the clearest understanding of a problem is not always the one with the authority to document it, and the boundary between what belongs to a department and what belongs to the organisation is, in practice, rarely clean. A system that can accommodate this — that allows contribution without requiring permission, that allows privacy without requiring separation, that allows structure to emerge from use rather than be imposed before it — is not merely more convenient. It is more honest about how knowledge actually moves between people.

Technical debt

Cookbooks

new file:   ape.php
new file:   cmsmode-README.txt
new file:   cmsmode.php
new file:   langviews.php
new file:   skinlist.php
new file:   highlight

To review

• Sophia template introduces changes in dark.php to generate page actions.
• Sophia template introduces changes in langviews.php to generate correct template language support html structure.
• dark.css and dark.js need a revision to remove old template functionality and styling.

User

Admin

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