Author: Sven Dowideit

You might remember me from tools like http://TWiki.org, http://Foswiki.org, https://github.com/docker/Boot2Docker, Docker documentation, or https://github.com/rancher/os

OpenID support for TWiki coming soon.

 

Sven Dowideit’s working on re-architecting TWiki’s authentication and session system to enable better support for external user management – for the upcoming TWiki 4.2.0 release in June, we should see OpenID support – at least for login, and registration – and later, TWiki will be able to be an OpenID providor too..

To make the June – July release, we’re expecting to re-release the Jan-Rain CPAN Consumer – to fix bugs, and make taint safe, and then depending on demand and support, to either maintain that library as the premier perl OpenID library, or when the SXIP library becomes a reality, to port to that.

I guess our thunder has been stolen by Sun’s rather big announcement – http://blogs.sun.com/superpat/entry/openid_at_sun … but it does make the work more important, as Sun use TWiki for things like http://wiki.java.net

debian repository for TWiki

I’ve set up a debian repository that you can help test the release package before it gets uploaded into debian proper.

To try it out, add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://distributedinformation.com/experimental/ experimental main contrib
deb-src http://distributedinformation.com/experimental/ experimental main contrib

and then run

gpg --keyserver the.earth.li --recv-keys 3C0C33BB442B5BE9
apt-key add /root/.gnupg/pubring.gpg
apt-get update
apt-get install apache2 twiki

I will be putting my ongoing work into the experimental distribution there, until they are ready for general use from my stable. From there I’ll be pushing them to my debian mentors.

This repository contains about 226 twiki-plugins – autoupdated nightly direct from twiki.org. THe packages have as many dependencies as I was able to coerce my build scripts to work out – but there is more work needed.

This article shows how simple it is to manage your own debian repository. The hard thing is making usable packages.

Sorry, you will get a gpg error on these packages, they are updated nightly direct from twiki.org – and signing the repository requires personal intervention (as far as I can see).

Adding Web 2.0 interface JavaScript to TWiki

While updating the YahooUserInterfaceContrib in TWiki to the just releases 2.2 version, I started to work with the BETA DataTable module.

Firstly, I’ve had to fix TWiki to put the headers and footers into the correct thead and tfoot HTML sections, and then there are the ‘tiny buglets’ 🙂

  1. sometimes the yui component initialises with only part of the html table
  2. yui hides all rows in the thead and tfoot section (so you loose the spreadsheet calculations we do in TWiki)
  3. you have to hand define the table header elements at the moment, rather than having an option to ‘autodetect’ their names, and possible sorty-ness

But it is a nice begining. I’ll be doing further work on it in TWiki (especially in the BugsContrib, and its derived task manager), and i’m planning on replacing the Catalyst DBIx paging with the dataTable Paging in mySpending.

Wiki’s are manic

I’ve been working in the wiki space (on JOSWiki then TWiki) for years, like 6 to 7 years, and it amazes me how much hype there is now. Its nice to see that the mainstream press and business are aware of it, but the recent ‘see it doesn’t work’ complaints show, they still don’t get it.

Either you care, and when you see a mess, you clean it up, or you continue on your way. Neither is a failure, just life.

Its kind of like Wysiwyg editing, I find it distracting – thats not to say i think its pointless, but it does mean that I make different choices, from those made by others.