What Is Standalone Qwiki?

Standalone Qwiki is a fast, zero-database documentation portal, internal knowledge base, and publishing engine written in PHP (>= 7.4), Vanilla JavaScript, and CSS.

Instead of requiring MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or a Node.js build pipeline, Standalone Qwiki stores navigation structure in qwiki.json, user accounts in users.json, documents as plain files under content/, and governance state under data/. Drop the folder onto any PHP-capable web host—at the domain root or inside any sub-folder—and it runs immediately.

Core Design Principles

1. Zero Database, Human-Inspectable Files: Every chapter is a standard .md, .html, .pdf, or .form.json file on disk. Backups are plain ZIP archives, migrations are file copies, and your content is never locked inside proprietary binary tables.
2. Location-Agnostic Deployment: All asset paths, navigation routes, and API calls resolve relative to the installation directory. Move a portal from /docs to /help or a dedicated subdomain without rewriting internal URLs.
3. Multi-Format Canvas: Unify technical Markdown (with GitHub alerts, Mermaid diagrams, KaTeX math, YAML frontmatter, and embedded videos), WYSIWYG HTML pages, interactive flat-file forms, PDFs, Google Docs, and federated remote documents inside one searchable sidebar.
4. Enterprise Governance Without Bloat: Role-based access control (admin and viewer), RFC 6238 2FA/TOTP, multi-tab advisory soft locks, pre-write revision history (tool-revisions), reversible trash (data/trash/), and append-only JSONL audit logs (tool-activity-log) run natively with zero external services.
5. AI-Native & Automation-Ready: Expose scoped read-only knowledge bases to coding assistants via api/llm.php (llms.txt and OpenAPI 3.0) and publish documentation continuously via api/publish.php and qwiki-builder.

Architecture at a Glance

flowchart LR
    Browser["Reader / Admin Browser"] --> Front["index.php & Clean URL Router"]
    Agent["AI Agent / qwiki-builder"] --> APIs["api/llm.php & api/publish.php"]

    Front --> Nav["Navigation & Visibility Gate"]
    APIs --> Nav

    Nav --> Config["qwiki.json & users.json"]
    Nav --> Content["content/ (.md, .html, .pdf, .form.json)"]
    Nav --> Data["data/ (locks, revisions, trash, talk, logs)"]
    Nav --> Ext["assets/extensions/ (page types & utilities)"]

Who Uses Standalone Qwiki?

Next, take a Workspace Quick Tour to see how the interface fits together.