Stuff I've been working on
We might not yet have a name, but we’ve had over 100 commits per week, plus the 400 odd coming from my importing into our repository. The rebranding changes for the ****** v1.0 release have been declared 80% done, so the worst case estimate would see the other 80% take about 8 weeks :).
Our bug and task tracking system’s live, with connections to svn commits, twitters and lots and lots of activity both on irc and the Wiki – Its almost impossible to keep up with everything.
In September 2008, there was a TWiki Summit in Berlin, at which a Community Council was elected by Community members to move the TWiki.org project to independence from the TWIKI.NET startup. A few days ago, TWIKI.NET responded, by taking over full control of all of TWiki.org’s servers, locking everyone out and converting the project to Commercial open source.
As I’ve been working on the TWiki codebase for almost 10 years – and started from JOSWiki too, I too feel uncomfortable about this change, Especially as re-signing up to twiki.org requires that I not only agree to a new terms of use, but also to their very evil commercialy based privacy policy – Personal information you provide (or have provided) to TWiki.org may be shared with TWIKI.NET to support ongoing business and communication processes. – essentially saying that they can use your information for marketing themselves, and to sell that information on (you can only opt out of being contacted.)
In the short term, I hope to continue supporting the TWiki installers I build, and with the rest of the active development community, to build an independent alternative.
Please support the twikifork if you’d like to support those that previously developed the codebase called TWiki.
http://blog.musmo.com/2008/10/29/the-end-of-twiki/ http://wordpress.metro.cx/2008/10/28/twiki-is-dead-long-live-twiki/ http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/BlogEntry28 http://fosiki.com/blog/2008/10/29/twiki-stops-being-open-source/ http://colas.nahaboo.net/Blog/TWiki_forks http://michaeldaumconsulting.com/Blog/BlogEntry72 http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/29/146201 http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=1339353 TWiki's hunt for cash fractures its community (CNET)
see me at OSDC 2008 – 3-5 December 2008. I’ll be giving a short talk and demo:
Traditional Wikis are about developing ‘legacy’ documents. Wikipedia is an asymptotic example where the ideal is to craft a perfect topic that accurately and concisely covers its subject matter.
Enterprise Wikis have a different focus :- they attempt to dynamically integrate processes, workflows and data, to support and automate an Enterprises Business Intelligence.
They provide integration points to provide not only an up to date status of an Enterprise, but to provide a Historical record of the development of that status, providing a Knowledge management and decision making framework.
Today, Enterprise Wiki’s are Social Knowledge management systems, recruiting peers throughout an organization, but leading into the future, Enterprise Wiki’s will become Knowledge driven Performance indicating Dashboards.
mirror 1 460MB (USA) TWiki 4.2.3, (does not include VMware):
Easy installation on Windows, Linux and OSX!
Trivial upgrades of TWiki and TWiki Plugins
Summary: This package enables you to quickly and easily install a pre-configured TWiki 4.2 ‘software appliance’ on Windows, by using the free VMware Player or VMware Server – like another computer running within your computer. This generally performs better than a normal WindowsInstallCookbook approach and is easier to install than IndigoPerlCookbook (takes just 5 minutes, a bit like installing a hard disk that has TWiki and Linux pre-installed). Although running TWiki on Linux on top of Windows may seem complicated, it’s actually much simpler than installing TWikiOnWindows – no TWiki or Linux knowledge is needed to get a working TWiki installation!
This uses TWiki VM 4.2.3 released on 12 September 2008. It is installed using SvenDowideit‘s fosiki TWiki debian package repository to make upgrades, and installation of TWiki Plugins (with external dependencies) easy.
I wasn’t able to travel from Sydney, Australia to Berlin for this summit – which means I’ve missed all 3 of them so far :(.
I was able to listen in on the conference calls made for the governance discussions, and was quite amazed at the strong commonality in the communities approaches and desires. I guess spending over 5 years talking over the same frustrations, and attempting solutions to them brings everyone on board extremely cohesively.
An amazing thing was that with Tom Barton (CEO) there, we heard from yet another TWIKI.NET decision maker that they were not aware of the feelings of the community – extremely scary for a startup that alleges to be working in the interests of the community.
Next major hurdle seems to be trademark control – Peter owns the ‘TWiki’ trademark, and TWIKI.NET wants to leverage that to gain an advantage in the TWiki community. It seems to me that the best response is for the community to avoid the issue – by doing what WireShark did when faced by a similar issues with the ‘Ethereal’ trademark – Rename and Re-brand the open source project.
There seems hope that things may not come to that – the second and final day saw the election of an Interm council to guide TWiki to a lasting democratic setup.
Either way, there is definitely cause to be optimistic about the project known as TWiki. Many thanks to Kenneth of Motorola for organising and hosting the Summit.
I just ran across a pretty annoying issue when updating one of my TWiki’s from 4.2.0 to 4.2.2. The server it is on was running Perl 5.10, but the Encode module was 2.25, resulting in Wysiwyg edits having all their spaces replaced with %20, and line feeds %0A ala
%20Debian%20equivalent%20of%20chkconfig%0A%0A/usr/sbin/update-rc.d%20avahi-daemon%20defaults%0A%0Ahttp%3A//wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Hardware%0A
(look familiar Martin? :))
perl -MCPAN -e shell
upgrade Encode
Got me to Encode v2.26, which fixed it for me.
update: Martin’s just confirmed that it didn’t help him on perl 5.8.4, so perhaps its an odd combination of outdated modules?
And along the way, TWiki’s inbuilt Topic and structured Search is going to get a boost too.
I’ve been working on trying to bring SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn into TWiki properly – by adding it as a configuration item in the SearchAlgorithms. So far, its a pretty cool – it super fast, especially on my test topic set of 50,000 plants – even allowing simple structured queries based on TWiki FormFields.
The work will require a few refactorings that will be in TWiki 4.2.2 and above (planned for mid-September), so I expect things to move along quickly.
This release makes over 150 improvements to the current Enterprise TWiki.
Along with many WYSIWYG Editing improvements, better UTF8 support, User mapping fixes and SEARCH improvements, This release contains an optimization that should see 4.2.1 being 10-30% faster than 4.2.0.
I will be updating the TWikiInstallers as soon as I can – the Windows installer should see the biggest impact, as I have managed to fix a number of SEARCH issues that are windows specific.
see TWikiRelease04x02x01 for more details.
I’ve just updated the Experimental TWiki and Plugins repository. It now contains TWiki 4.2.0 and 212 Plugins, Contribs and Skins that you can simply apt-get install
To use them, add the following 2 lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://distributedinformation.com/experimental/ experimental main contrib
deb-src http://distributedinformation.com/experimental/ experimental main contrib
then type
apt-get update
to update the available packages.
you can now see all 212 packages with apt-cache search twiki-
and install (assuming you don’t have twiki installed yet)
apt-get install apache2 twiki
and TWiki Contrib installation is as easy as
apt-get install twiki-bugscontrib
You will still need to use configure to enable Plugins.
Please report your experiences to me – bugs, gripes, you name it – its a work in progress. and I need your help!
(test post using Gnome Webog poster)
The last fortnight, I’ve been working on creating a new, soon to be released to web 2.0 ‘Beta’ site based on TWiki 4.2.0. That means that I’ve been busy finding, reporting and fixing Bugs for TWiki 4.2.1.
The list todate are:
Item5455 BuildContrib doesn’t cope with larger numbers of files Closed 15 Apr 2008 – 04:34 SvenDowideit
Item5536 robots.txt is missing some obvious scripts – like login Waiting for Release 14 Apr 2008 – 08:43 SvenDowideit
Item5535 IF{“$BANNER” does not really work. Waiting for Release 14 Apr 2008 – 06:49 SvenDowideit
Item5534 missing contexts for several bin scripts Waiting for Release 14 Apr 2008 – 06:25 SvenDowideit
Item5533 tmpl login script does not do writeCompletePage, so it does not get addToHEAD bits. Waiting for Release 14 Apr 2008 – 05:10 SvenDowideit
Item5513 update TalkContrib topic Closed 11 Apr 2008 – 06:19 SvenDowideit
Item5509 IF & query String matching may be incorrectly greedy. Waiting for Release 11 Apr 2008 – 01:55 SvenDowideit
Item5501 IF allows does not work correctly if the topic does not exist. Waiting for Release 11 Apr 2008 – 01:41 SvenDowideit
Item5510 initial version of TalkContrib Closed 09 Apr 2008 – 08:11 SvenDowideit
Item5499 TWiki::UI::Resister::changePassword sends login, not cUID to TWiki::Users::setPassword Waiting for Release 04 Apr 2008 – 02:24 SvenDowideit
Item5496 Conclusion: Turn off UTF-8 test case until bug is fixed (4.2 branch only) Waiting for Release 03 Apr 2008 – 02:06 SvenDowideit
Item5495 add twikiBroadcastMessage class div to default & classic skins Waiting for Release 03 Apr 2008 – 00:53 SvenDowideit