Case Study:
Southeastern Railway

Customer

Southeastern Railway is one of the United Kingdom’s major train operating companies, running a fleet of more than 350 trains in Kent and South London. Their DokuWiki installation has been in use since 2012 and has grown into the single source of technical information for Engineering and Train Maintenance, holding around 40,000 pages, 20,000 images and 5,000 attached documents. The wiki is used by roughly 800 users — including a core of about 50 regular authors and a full-time team for system administration and content management — and relies extensively on access control lists for author approval and document revision control. Southeastern’s award-winning use of DokuWiki has even inspired other large UK train operating companies to adopt the platform.

Project

Southeastern’s Engineering Systems department was looking for a fresh, modern design for their engineering documentation wiki and a reliable partner to keep the platform running smoothly in the long term. The wiki had grown into a central knowledge base for the department and needed both a contemporary look and feel and continuous hands-on support to remain a dependable everyday tool.

Implementation

CosmoCode has been supporting Southeastern’s engineering wiki for many years. During this time we have delivered a range of DokuWiki customisations, open-source plugins and a custom template, alongside ongoing platform support.

To meet Southeastern’s specific requirements for namespace governance, CosmoCode developed the newnamespacepermissions plugin, which gives administrators precise control over who is allowed to create new sections in the wiki. To improve how users find relevant information in a large, long-lived engineering knowledge base, CosmoCode built the searchdefaults plugin, which lets administrators tailor the default search behaviour to match the way the team actually works.

Southeastern also relies heavily on the watchcycle plugin to keep their documentation under an explicit review cycle. CosmoCode significantly extended the plugin for them, adding editor tooling and integrating maintenance information into the wiki’s search experience, so that pages that are actively maintained stand out from outdated content.

To give the wiki the fresh, modern look the department was after, CosmoCode designed and built the notos template specifically for Southeastern’s requirements: a clean DokuWiki template with a prominent horizontal main navigation and a responsive layout that works well on every screen size. At Southeastern’s wish, the template was released as open source so that the wider DokuWiki community can benefit from it as well.

Beyond these individual developments, CosmoCode provides Southeastern with continuous hands-on support for their wiki. This includes regular DokuWiki upgrades and the adjustments needed to keep the installation compatible with current PHP versions as the platform evolves. Through this long-term partnership the engineering documentation remains on a stable, current and well-maintained foundation.

Kunde

Southeastern Railway

Zeitraum

2018 – heute