Go together.

team-driven websites

Wagn is a team vehicle – websites built by teams for teams.

On Wagn websites, every change, whether to structure or content, is tracked and reversible, which is vital for creators working together. And its elegant permissions system lets you seamlessly integrate public with private and shared with personal. So you and your team are simultaneously connected and protected.

Wagn works for teams of all sizes. Small teams may create everything together. Wagn's simple, stream-lined design makes it great for intimate projects like these. With larger projects, many teams have to work independently while integrating together. At all scales, Wagn can adapt to your teams' blend of autonomy and interconnection.

community knowledge

Healthy communities learn. Very healthy communities record and share.

Few tools exists to help communities and organizations do this well. A good community knowledge repository has to respect the communities' complexity while staying friendly and approachable to community members who aren't technophiles.

Wagn serves this need by letting advanced users structure information dynamically while giving less technically ambitious members a more serene user experience. This lets knowledge grow like topsoil, collected from deposits over time to produce fertile ground from which more community creations can sprout.

free, open-source software

Wagn is licensed under the GNU General Public License (version 2 or later).

"Free" means you're not trapped. You're not trapped paying the licensers every time you want a change. You're not trapped by the whims of the licenser's hosting and pricing policies. You're free. Also, you don't have to pay.

"Open-source" has become a banner slogan for all kinds of transparency, but it has a specific meaning with software. The "source" code is the code that humans can read. It's not a bunch of ones and zeroes; it's words like "if" and "then" and "module". If the source is closed, nobody but robots and licensers really knows how it works. We're proud of our code; we want people to see it. And because we take that approach, many generous developers have contributed improvements to the project.

reusable data

Clean data is D.R.Y. (Don't Repeat Yourself). Wagn data is reused – not repeated.

Consider the case when Jean's address has been cut and pasted into five documents. What happens when Jean moves? With most software, there are two possible answers: (1) a lot of work, or (2) a big mess.

With Wagn, you could include the same address in five places, and then update them all automatically with a single edit. Wagn makes it easy to reuse and reformat data by breaking it into highly flexible chunks called cards. Because you can include cards anywhere you want, there's no need to cut and paste. And if you update the information once, it's updated everywhere. Wherever it goes, it goes together.

edit-where-you-are

Editing content shouldn't take technical training.

Sadly enough, that's the norm. Content management systems are usually built with special admin areas that require contributors to learn a special interface just to fix a spelling error. Busy content creators would often rather email a technician than bother learning or re-learning how admin structures connect to what they're seeing on a web page.

With Wagn, you can edit what you see right where you are -- without leaving the page. In fact, those who edit structure ("Wagneers") can too. All of this in-place editing means fewer context shifts and thus fewer distraction from the creators' task at hand -- to create great content. And since less time is spent knocking on techies' doors, the content can go together in a hurry.

evolving structures

Your projects evolve; your tools should evolve with them.

You may have heard the horror stories of web developers charging thousands of dollars to add a field or move a box. Sometimes it's simple exploitation -- free, open-source software saves you from that grief because you can always hire other help. But just as often the problem is that the software has not been designed to evolve.

Wagn's data design relies on simple building blocks that you can connect and re-connect in flexible ways. This means you don't have to rely on figuring out every data structure you'll ever need before you've even gotten started. You can create what makes sense at the beginning and evolve as you go. Wherever you steer your project, you and your data structures should go there together.

simple parts, coherent wholes

Coherent data systems let you combine its parts into readily understandable wholes.

Wagn is designed for continuously creating new ways to digest and use information by combining and recombining its parts. The basic building block of Wagn is called the card. Cards are very simple -- they just have a name, a type, and some content. But by combining and connecting cards, Wagneers can create greater and greater wholes.

Wagn is unusual in its fidelity to simple parts, because we believe that simplicity is what gives creators the freedom and power they need to do great things. Like the points in a Seurat painting, individual cards add up to a beautiful whole. And in the era of data overwhelm, freedom and coherence are a wonderful but rare combination.