Participants of the last TWiki summit

Did you know, that Foswiki is now an officially registered association with bylaws and all that is needed, to prevent that community from being influence by commercial interests? Yay! Thank you once more to Jens Hanssen and a lot of others to make this possible. we want to have our very first general assembly and use it also for our first Foswiki Summit.

The event takes place on the 21st and 22nd of November 2009 in Hannover, Germany. We will meet at Krokus (Stadtteilzentrum Kronsberg), Thie 6, 30539 Hannover (see on Google Maps for more details). There are already 16 community members registered for the event. Almost all of us gather for an informal Get-Together already on Friday at 8 pm at the restaurant Cheers, Marschnerstrasse 2, Hannover (Map, public transportation: Station “Christuskirche”, Line 6).

We would love to see you there also. The event is free to attend and you do not have to become a Foswiki Association member, if you participate. Everybody is welcome.

Register for the event by simply adding your name in our summit wiki page!

Gathering with the Foswiki community is a lot of fun

This week, Foswiki has turned One!

Foswiki was started as a fork on the 27 October 2008. A year later and the Foswiki project is still going strong. We have now had well over 5,000 commits to our Subversion repository from nearly 60 active developers.

That’s not all, as of today there are 217 quality Extensions available to download that modify and enhance Foswiki, interface with other systems, and much more.

There is still much more to come from Foswiki, with some great work going into the 1.1 release and yet more upcoming extensions. This is only the beginning, and with the help of the community Foswiki will continue to be a success for many years to come.

Why not help us celebrate our birthday by joining us at our first Foswiki Summit next month? Its a great opportunity to shape the future of Foswiki. If you can’t be there in person there will also be opportunities to join in virtually.

Congratulations to Foswiki and the hard work of the community over the last year.

TWiki.net is successful and has compelling language in its marketing materials. The organization jazzed up its website, has participated in several wiki competitions, and are mentioned in blog posts on wikis. For the uniniated, TWiki.org and TWiki.net are controlled by the same organization. While TWiki.org is the “open source” face of TWiki.net, TWiki.net is siginificantly a marketing arm of TWiki.net, funneling sales leads from the former to the latter.

I am writing this article not as a rant against TWiki, but in the interest of all those who consider TWiki as their enterprise wiki and want to compare it with Foswiki. As this is the official Foswiki weblog, there will be a bias for Foswiki. Nevertheless, I have tried an even-handed approach to the material below, attempting to keep any “spin” to a minimum. Here are my theses that I will lay out in detail later:

1. Twiki.net is good at marketing. But their marketing won’t buy you the love for the product from your employees. It converts into nothing you need in your company.
2. But TWiki has modest product development underway and little active community. But these attributes are what you need as a customer. You need a slick product. You need developers who enhance your solution with plugins and innovate. And a product needs an active and living community to foster its development.
3. Foswiki has a strong product development and a strong community. That is important for you as a customer. In TWiki there is no strong community left.

Video Trailer for this blog post:

The details

I will now address the areas “Community”, “Product development” and “Marketing” in more detail:

Community

Although it might not evident at first sight, the people behind a product are most important for the success of the product in the long run. There is no product development and no innovation without a community.

For TWiki

The leftovers at TWiki.net are Peter Thoeny and his employees. There is little community activity to be seen, unfortunately. It would also be cool for TWiki.net to have an active community instead of what we see now. If Twiki does not change the lack of community soon, it will simply die from inactivity in product development eventually. If you look at the download page of the open source product TWiki you will see 13 links to the “commercial owner” TWiki.net. Before you can download you are requested to fill out a form. And the form contents go to where? To TWiki.net. This is not the environment for professional consultants. This is a way to ensure no professional community evolves.

13 links to the commercial entity TWiki.net dry out community-activity.

The TWiki Download-Area is also only a marketing data collection activity for TWiki.net. Is that open source?

The Foswiki community is strong and an independent association was just founded

The people who developed TWiki during the last 10 years have moved to Foswiki. These people have founded a democratic and fully-independent Foswiki association Foswiki community members report the wiki development is now fun again. And that’s what makes projects like Foswiki thrive. A good, active, and living community is the basis of every successful open source project.

Product development

TWiki development

TWiki.net seems to have concentrated on marketing and left the development up to Foswiki. TWiki.net can incorporate Foswiki code in their software quite easily as both applications share the same code base. All that might be new and probably developed by Peter Thoeny is proprietory and for sale. I have my doubts that this practice of depriving the community of new features is compliant with the GPL. That might also be simple ignorance. But all these exclusive “features” cannot be seen and assessed. To date, I have not seen a video or a screenshot or a thorough description of these “exclusive” features. You should be very cautious if things are only promised but not shown.

Back to community development. To my knowledge, there is not a single feature in TWiki that would not have been available in Foswiki before. And I am watching TWiki pretty closely.

Foswiki development

Within 11 months since the TWiki fork Foswiki was created, we saw more than 5000 code checkins from developers. A lot of new plugins have been made available to extend your user experience. I want to point to three of them:

1. Topic Permission Plugin and the Section Permission Plugin for the rights management of individual pages
2. Autosave-Plugin, so you don’t loose data any more, when your browser crashes
3. Innovation-Management-Plugin to give your employees certain amount of points to vote on business ideas within your company.

These are just three of numerous examples that they really rock in my opinion.

Foswiki has fixed 400 bugs that are still unresolved in TWiki. Did you know that?

Disclaimer: This blog post only reflects the view of Martin Seibert as an individual. It is not an official statement of the Foswiki community and it might not represent all opinions. Additionally, as I have been kicked out of the TWiki-community like all other members last year, I might have missed certain details. I am happy for you to add them through the commenting feature below.

Kino Search is a Perl port of the Lucene indexed based search engine from Apache. It provides a very fast full text search across large amounts of data, plus the ability to use Google style operators.

The Foswiki implementation is made up of the KinoSearchContrib and the KinoSearchPlugin. Not only does this provide indexed search for topics, it also has the ability to index a number of attachments, including MS Office 2003 and 2007 documents and PDF’s.

The KinoSearchContrib is the workhorse, providing the indexer and a script for the searching. The KinoSearchPlugin is a thin wrapper around it that hooks into Foswiki to provide a %KINOSEARCH% macro and support for indexing on immediately when a topic has been saved.

There are a number of improvements over the previous version of Kino Search for Foswiki, including:

• Fast CGI and mod_perl support
• Indexing MS Office 2007 files
• Much more resilient indexing
  • In particular when indexing password protected files or when an incorrect file type is supplied (such as attaching a image and calling it myfile.txt)
• Using more of the official Foswiki API
• Improved documentation and templates

If your Foswiki install has grown to a size where the performance of the default search is starting to suffer then you will need this extension. Of course smaller wikis will also benefit from the attachment search.

Release of Foswiki version 1.0.7, 20 Sep 2009

On behalf of the entire Foswiki community I can proudly announce the
release of the Foswiki patch release 1.0.7

Foswiki 1.0.7 is available for download at the following locations

* Foswiki web site: http://foswiki.org/Download

Since the January release of 1.0.0 more than 190 additional bugs have
been fixed.

Foswiki 1.0.7 was built 20 Sep 2009. It is a patch release with more
than 190 bug fixes relative to 1.0.0 and some enhancements. This release
fixes some serious issues introduced by the CSRF fix and the redirect
cache fix in 1.0.6. Major enhancement that also fixes many annoying
editor bugs is the upgrade of the !Tiny MCE editor to version 3.2.2.

It is highly recommended to upgrade your Foswiki to 1.0.7.

You can read the full email here.

• Installers for Windows and Mac are already available on the download page just as other downloads.

Important Changes since Foswiki 1.0.6

• The Wysiwyg editor has been upgraded to using Tiny MCE editor version 3.2.2 which solves many editor related bugs. The pickaxe icon has been replaced by a “Wiki Text” button as the pickaxe was hard to guess the function of. And the editor now has a full screen editing feature. This is the biggest and most important change in that release, that you will find in Foswiki 1.0.7. A big thank you goes to Crawford Currie for making this possible.
• Several bugs fixed related to the Cross-Site Request Forgery feature.
• Cross-Site Request Forgery feature has been enhanced to also protect against unwanted attachment of files
• TablePlugin sorts numbers and dates better
• EditTablePlugin handles SpreadSheetPlugin in footer rows correctly
• Fixed a problem where Windows installations of Foswiki would create new users with non-working passwords
• “Managing webs” feature redesigned for better usability

Foswiki has been full of activity after the fork and we are happy to see, that former TWiki-contributors  have almost completely moved to Foswiki and more and more new developers have started to join the young Foswiki-project.

We will run a series of blog posts, that will show you new plugins and features, that do not and will most likely never exist in TWiki, that are already available in the Foswiki-core-repository.

To prevent a dependency to single individuals in the future, the forkers have started to work on a Foswiki-association ever since the fork was created. Namely Jens Hansen and André Ulrich pushed the project of founding a Foswiki-association with their TaskTeam.

The result will be an official entity, that has professional bylaws and will be led by true and fair democratic principles, that will guarantee an independent, strong and transparent community leadership. At the moment the Foswiki association is pending in the registration process. That will last for about 4 weeks. These are the official bylaws of the Foswiki-community, which are available in English and German language:

The official Foswiki Articles Association

The official founding protocol is only available in German:

Founding Protocol Foswiki Association

“On Wednesday the 09.09.2009 we came together for the initial Founding of the Foswiki Association. After four hours of meeting it was created – articles explained and agreed, iInitial board elected as well as signatures approved with the notary. Afterwards we took a beer and had some nice chats. I guess we will manage to upload some pictures during the weekend.
Oh by the way…

This is the (temporary) board:

1. Chairman: André Ulrich
2. Vice Chairman: Ingo Kappler
3. Treasurer: Oliver Krüger
4. Member of Board: Oliver Laudenbach
5. Member of Board: Markus Ueberall

Congratulations and thanks for the effort. Some of you did a lot of traveling to make this possible.”

Foswiki is now one out of few if not the only free-and-open-source-wiki for enterprises that has an official association, to back it. We hope that this will increase the trust in our project and will protect us from shortcomings, that we suffered from as the “real” TWiki-community.

The community is now preparing a general community gathering to let all association members vote on a new and legitimate board of directors. The community assembly will be both physical and virtual. So please help us creating the agenda and join the Foswiki community for this virtual assembly.

We need your support to make Foswiki an on-going success. Here is how you can help us.

There has been a lot of cheering for the founding members going on in our mailing list already. Cheer us up by commenting this topic.

I just committed the initial version of the FreeBSD port for Foswiki
1.0.6: http://www.freshports.org/www/foswiki/

This port enables you to install Foswiki on FreeBSD with the simple
command:

cd /usr/ports/www/foswiki && make install clean

I’m still working on some scaffolding in the port to support
auto-generated Foswiki plugin ports. Once that’s done, I’ll add a port
for each plugin found in http://svn.foswiki.org/trunk/.

If anyone has feedback, bug reports or patches, please send them along!

If you want to make Foswiki adapt better to your needs help us to improve this open source software.

Here is, how you can help.

4 250GB disks

Although providing less CPU power (a quad core Xeon CPU at 2.00GHz), the new server surpasses the previous one on disk-I/O: with 4 250GB 7200RPM SATA-II disks each with 8MB cache, a RAID 1+0 setup gives us 500GB of fast storage. The decrease in CPU power is insignificant against this improvement in I/O-throughput; foswiki is I/O-bound in nature, not CPU-bound. This also goes for the subversion repository. By the way, the server has 6GB of memory.

The new server was paid for by my company, Sonologic. I hope to recover some of the investment by donations from the community, and so far 5 people have pledged an amount already (covering about a third of the cost). Colocation and bandwidth is provided free of charge to the project.

Connected to the net

The server capacity more than suffices for the task at hand (hosting foswiki.org and the subversion repository), but plans are in place to distribute the load among multiple servers. On the one hand we want to distribute web page requests for the wiki geographically, with multiple servers distributed around the globe. On the other hand, whereas now all services run on one server, in the future (near-future I hope) this might prove to be too much. At that point, we will have to move the subversion repository, for example, to another server.

But that is all in the future. For now, the Foswiki community can be happy with having their own server. I want to thank the govcom.org foundation for hosting the Foswiki community up until now, giving us time to sort things out!

In a standard Foswiki setup there is a topic in every web called WebTopicList, which is linked to from the side bar as Index. By default it simply lists all the topics in one big list, as shown below (or view onfoswiki.org):

This certainly isn’t very elegant. Luckily by using Michael Daum’s Filter Plugin we can improve the index by giving it some structure and making it more like a directory, as shown below:

To do this we only need to make a small change to the WebTopicList in the System web. Since all the other webs simply import that page the changes will be immediately visible across the wiki with just the one change.

Edit the WebTopicList topic and replace this line:

%TOPICLIST{"   * [[%BASEWEB%.$name][$name]]"}%

With this:

%MAKEINDEX{"%TOPICLIST{"$name" separator=","}%" cols="3" header="$anchors" format="[[%BASEWEB%.$item][$item]]"}%

Thats it! You now get a much more friendly and useful index in all of your webs.

Note: This tip has also been made available on foswiki.org.

We like to say thanks to the Pootle community for developing this tool and for the very friendly and helpful support. Special thanks goes to Friedel who helped on #pootle IRC to get the tool running.

Foswiki Translation Framework

As we want to make the translation process as open as possible, everyone can make suggestions for translations without even to log in.

To assure high quality and consistent wording every language has a coordinator, who can approve translations and push them into the Foswiki SVN repository. On the Translation-Team topic you will find a list of all coordinators and translators supporting the effort.

Our community is growing every day and language support needs to speed up. It is our quality goal to offer Foswiki in as many languages as possible. This makes using Foswiki more convenient especially for beginners. The Translation framework is a big step to reach this aim. It is an invitation to everybody, to support the translation process and make Fowiki the best wiki ever created.

If you can’t wait to support the translation effort on Foswiki, please get in contact with our language coordinator André Ulrich.