BrutalWiki

As of 2021, the days when every web nerd made their own pet wiki engine for fun are past. BrutalWiki is a throwback. Think of it as a toy or art piece.

Since you're still reading, here are the technical details.

BrutalWiki is a wiki engine written in PHP, with some unique traits:

• Aims to follow Brutalist web design principles such as clarity of purpose.
• It uses rocket links throughout, making for a very distinct authorial voice.
• The database is contained in a single JSON file that can be handled by many 3rd-party tools; that means you can only have so much text on any one wiki, but backups become very easy, and you're never locked in.

Otherwise, BrutalWiki is geared towards personal use. It tries to be somewhat robust and secure, but isn't exactly industrial-strength. Known user: Gorf. See also: capsule review on the SDF Wiki.

Live demo

The demo is read-only, but you can try BrutalWiki on your own server:

Download (20K)

The current version is 1.5.1 as of 21 March 2025. You can have it under the terms of the Artistic Licence 2.0 (included with the source code). See inside for how to get support, and other useful information.

For a more practical successor, see AntiWiki.

A little history: initial development took place in 2021-2022, but then everyone upgraded to PHP 8 and BrutalWiki stopped working. Lacking the bandwidth to deal with it, I shelved the project for three years. But due to a fan getting in touch (thanks, Gorf!) now it's back!