Foswiki will have a booth on this year’s CeBIT fair sponsored by Linux New Media AG. So come visit us in Hall 2, Section E58 at the Open Source Forum 6th – 10th March. More information at http://foswiki.org/Community/FoswikiCeBIT2012.

One of the great strengths of Foswiki is that it stores topics in plain text files. This feature has proven its worth time and again, as Foswiki is able to quickly adapt to organisational change, easily support external processes that write to topics, and is quickly accessible for emergency measures. For an admin who has login access to the server, it’s very easy to use the command-line to make bulk changes to many topics simultaneously.

In Foswiki 1.1.4 we addressed a nasty bug that was inherited from the very earliest days of TWiki. This bug could result in serious history errors such as the wrong username being attributed to edits, incorrect revision numbers, and broken revision histories. Unfortunately there was a side-effect of this fix that anyone who modifies topics on the server needs to be aware of, and take action on.

Any process (or person) that changes a .txt file on the server must make sure that the corresponding .txt,v file is left with a file date that is equal to or more recent than the .txt file.

If you don’t do this, Foswiki will be forced to constantly re-read the .txt,v for the correct revision history, which can affect performance. Also, when such a topic is edited, Foswiki will create a new revision attributed to the “UnknownUser” to record that the topic was changed outside of Foswiki’s control. This is the correct behaviour in the general case, and will save less experienced users a lot of pain. However more experienced users may know that their changes are ’safe’ and that no change to the topic history is required. In this case, it is trivial to update the file date on the .txt,v file. In summary,

• After making any manual change to a .txt file on the server make sure that the corresponding .txt,v is ‘touched’ (use the UNIX ‘touch’ command, or simply text-edit and save the file)
• Scripts that make bulk changes to files – and external processes that write .txt files – should be modified to ‘touch’ the .txt,v files after writing.
• If you have already made such a change but can’t remember which files you changed, you can use the following linux command line to ‘touch’ all .txt,v files (this is perfectly safe)

find /path/to/foswiki/data -name '*.txt,v' -exec touch \{\} \;

Foswiki is now over 3 years old, and its still an extremely active project: Congratulations and thankyou!

The Foswiki Association’s Board has just elected the new Office holders:

• Chairman: Sven Dowideit
• Vice Chairman: Crawford Currie
• Treasurer: Oliver Krueger

As the new chairman, I hope to continue the great work that Crawford did in guiding our foundation so far, and take the opportunity I have to thank Kenneth for the work he did the last 2 years, and for the experience he has passed on to the Board in general.

For 2012, I have suggested that we work on improving our communications both within our community and towards the outside world – for example by developing more microblogging tools like the Extension News, and then creating a regular newsletter from those feeds. Given that foswiki is a do-ocracy, that means I just volunteered myself to building some more tools for foswiki.org, and then to write newsletters.

In case you’re still reading this, the Board has a question for you – we now have 1,385 euros in the bank, is there anything we could use this money for that would positively impact on the community, its growth and visibility?

Have a happy and productive 2012

It took 8 months and 2 days since the previous one to come out with yet another release of Foswiki, the Open Source Enterprise Wiki. Just in time before people dash off into Christmas holidays. So don’t forget to fetch your copy now available at http://foswiki.org/Download/DownloadFoswiki.

This release of Foswiki comes with quite some new features and more than 160 crunched bugs relative to the previous release. Here are some highlights:

Read up all the details on the full release notes.

The Foswiki team wishes you quiet and relaxing Christmas holidays. See you next year.

The intrepid Foswiki computer science & engineering team, prepared with appropriate safety gear, about to delve into the core. Boldly seeking new discoveries and features to enhance Foswiki for the benefit of all. More at Sven’s photo stream …

We’ve carried on with the Foswiki Camp today, and wow, has it been a productive camp!

Andrew Jones has done an amazing job leading the effort on using PSGI / Plack to replace the low-level Foswiki engine, for simplified installation and ease of support across a wide range of platforms.

Andrew has also taken significant steps towards simplifying the installation documentation for new users.

Michael Daum has led the development of a super new plugin that helps admins find out what extensions can be upgraded on their installs. A bit of documentation and it’ll be ready for prime-time.

Olivier Raginel has led the move to git – we’ve managed to convert all the hooks, set up the DNS and otherwise get lots of preparation done.

Arthur Clemens has implemented support for displaying each search result differently, based on any attribute of the topic the result was found in. This makes the presentation of search results much sexier.

Arthur has also done a power of work on the awesome new base skin.

Padraig Lennon has led the development of a new “WikiApps” web on foswiki.org that helps people share and explore wiki applications in a simple and effective way.

Everyone at the camp has been fully engaged and productive – even to the extent of turning down free beers in order to keep on working!

We’ve been having fun at the 2011 Foswiki Camp! As well as some great discussions (and surprisingly few arguments) we have turned our hands to some hardcore hacking. Here’s some of what we’ve been working on:

• A new skin that will provide a strong base for the default install, and a good platform to build more sophisticated skins on. We’re applying learnings from many different skin developments to create a modern, HTML5-ready, easy to extend, look and feel.
• An exciting new methodology for packaging wiki applications, including a “play pen” which allows end users to try out applications in their own safe environment on foswiki.org, before deciding whether to install or not.
• Simplified and refined installation documentation for the core.
• First steps in replacing the Foswiki::Engine and low level CGI code, with the modern web ‘Plack’ framework (the Perl equivalent of Ruby’s excellent ‘Rack’).
• A clever new plugin that will notify foswiki admins when extension updates become available, that affect their own installations, saving them from missing out on important releases.
• A nice mind-map

What we haven’t started yet, but hope to get to tomorrow:

• Help people to share their own wiki applications on foswiki.org, in an easily accessible way.
• Ease the handling of attachments, supporting multi-upload using drag and drop, pagination through large lists, and download of zip archives of multiple attachments.
• Attack the “unicode” branch with interactive testing, to see how big the hole is.

Other messages that have come from the last couple of days include:

• We want to make Foswiki something that our users never grow out of, and that means keeping up with the technology curve. Store2, unicode, and Plack are all exciting advances that help us enormously.
• Continuity – ensuring safety of data and applications – always has been, and always will be, incredibly important to us.
• We really need to have more of these camps! The ideas exchanged, and the work done, have been incredible. The more the merrier!

The Foswiki Association is pleased to announce its 3rd General Assembly and Birthday Celebration, 19th-20th November 2011, at CERN Geneva.

• http://foswiki.org/Community/AgendaThirdGeneralAssembly

This is a great opportunity to meet some of the faces behind the IRC handles, to talk about Foswiki, and an excuse to visit the lovely Geneva area.

All association members are very welcome to attend. We’d love to meet you in person, but if you can’t make it physically we’ll be setting up channels to help you join in virtually. If you’re not a member of the Foswiki association yet, see http://foswiki.org/Community/CurrentFoswikiMembers – all are welcome.

We’re also excited to be holding our first one-day FoswikiCamp on the 18th November 2011 at CERN Geneva (the day before the GA). The plan is to have one or more fun “sprints”to scratch some itches that have been bothering us. See

• http://foswiki.org/Community/FoswikiCamp

The GA is open to all association members, and the camp is open to anyone. Due to access controls at CERN we need to know in advance if you are coming, so please add your name to the relevant lists in the Foswiki topics linked above.

(We might even have a Foswiki release 1.1.4 to celebrate too!)

Update: Every year on the General Assembly people have the opportunity to become a Foswiki Member. This is a great way to help Foswiki to grow and gives you the right to vote on any decisions to be made on a General Assembly as well. To apply for membership add yourself to http://foswiki.org/Community/CurrentFoswikiMembers#Membership_Applications and contact two of the current Foswiki Members to support your application.

After another round of intense coding Foswiki 1.1.3 has been released this weekend and is available for download at

http://foswiki.org/Download/FoswikiRelease01×01x03

Foswiki 1.1.3 is a release that adds more than 150 bug fixes and improvements making it better than the already stable 1.1.2. Upgrade package is available for upgrading from any earlier 1.1.X version to 1.1.2.

Here is a summarized but still detailed list of the many small fixes and improvements

• Facelift of the history user interface
• Update to the Wysiwyg editor TinyMCE to 3.3.9.3 and further
• improvements of the Wysiwyg editor has been made
• Fatwilly PatternSkin theme has been fixed. This is the skin theme
• we use on foswiki.org.
• Improvement of the UI for managing webs
• Default jQuery is now 1.4.3. JQueryPlugin’s form plugin form is
• upgraded to 2.49 and jquery-ui is upgraded to 1.8
• Code that sends emails is improved
• Fixes in the access controls for renaming attachments
• TablePlugin now handles table row spans and can now initsort even when there is no headerrow
• Improved login screen
• Configure user interface has been further improved
• Improved the use of international characters in attachment names
• Icons have been fixed and added
• Fixed an annoying issue where configure could only install or
• upgrade one extension at a time
• SEARCH order=created and order=formfield(date) now works allowing sorting by dates given in any of the standard Foswiki formats
• Query search using the new =~ regex operator was totally broken and has been fixed
• Improved and fixed the page feature for SEARCH
• SEARCH limit fixed so it again works per web
• New languages added
• CommentPlugin now allows the use of COMMENT inside TML tables
• Scripted update of the “shebang” line for the bin files (important for Windows based server installations)
• Cookies are now forced to be secure when using https connection
• Redirect when renaming fixed
• Fixed bugs in the renaming user interface
• Corrected the documentation for access controls
• Improved how search handles access controlled group topics
• Fixes to the new group user interface
• Extension installers now tries to install the zip file if tgz missing
• Fixed some intermittent rendering issues under FastCGI
• Interwiki links now allows that the destination topic contains parentheses
• Rename topics now updates backlinking inside INCLUDEs
• Split Installation Guide in a part 1 which covers the steps until a basic Foswiki is running and a part 2 which covers how to tailor and setup all the details.
• Fixed TOC rendering of anchors for INCLUDEd content
• Fixed the renaming of webs web so it no longer modifies links within topic starting with old web name
• Fixed a problem with date formats inside EditTablePlugin formats being seen as macros
• Fixed the function of buttons in the FamFamFamContrib toolbar
• Rename will now list children to update even when the topic is not a WikiWord
• First save of files without rcs ,v file now creates a new revision
• Restore a topic to older version now also restores META preferences
• Search with zeroresults=”0″ now prints a 0 when nothing is found
• Fixed the use of default value for FORMFIELD macro
• Better cleanup of LocalSite.cfg when removing a plugin
• Logging improved and more events are now logged
• URLENCODE macro fixed
• Fixed bugs related to adding a form when editing
• Fixed defaults not initialized in persistent perl environments
• Fix for REVINFO format tokens
• When editing a form only, Save and Continue no longer end up showing the topic text
• The 8 char password trunc behavior of the crypt encoding is now clearly added as working in configure info texts
• Fix for WEBLIST macro which wrongly included current web when webs=webtemplate requested
• Added missing Submit button for renaming/deleting a web
• Webnotify now supports wildcard use like ‘Abc*Xyz?’ for sending out news on change
• Fixed a problem where TwistyPlugin crashes Foswiki when topic has a trailing )
• InterwikiPlugin links can now be formatted
• Fixed a problem with operator precedence for queries and IF defined.
• TWiki web is now again hidden if TWikiCompatibilityPlugin is disabled – also for the admin
• Many improvements to the installation documentation.
• Wysiwyg editor now converts less of the international characters to entities which made it impossible to search for the saved text

The Foswiki community is doing well.  We are developing and we are releasing and we are supporting and responding.

Task number are now 5 digit numbers and SVN checkins are getting close to 10000. That is an average of around 10-15 per day incl weekends.

The practical household and legal ownership is the responsibility of the Foswiki Association.

It is not the Foswiki Association that develops the software or answers support questions. The Association mainly take care that we have working webservers and software repository. And we ensure the project has a roadmap and that tasks teams are working and empowered. And we own the Foswiki name and the domain names. In every day life the community should not notice the association. Thing should just work. And they do. Very well.

It is a year ago since we had the founding General Assembly. The General Assembly is the higest authority and its main purpose is to elect the executive board and approve accounting and budgets.So we will soon have the 2nd General Assembly. Because of some tax detail in Germany we were not ready for November and December is holiday time so the 2nd General Assembly will be held in the beginning of January.

There is a Doodle vote in progress to find the best date. http://www.doodle.com/h2b5kqm5skyrgtfu

The official invitation will be sent out 6 weeks before the date we decide via the Doodle vote. The general assembly will be a conference call on the phone. You will not need to travel to participate.

We welcome new members.

You do not need to be a member of the association to be a contributor to the project. Anyone can contribute code, proposals, etc. But if you want to support the work and have influence on the executiveboard then we are happy to see you as member. Current membership fee is 10 Euros per year so in practical membership is free.

The rules for membership are described in the articles of the association and they require the following steps

1. You need to contact an existing member of the association and ask him/her to recommend you as member. If you have been visible on IRC or this mailing list, or on the foswiki.org site, we are many that will be happy to recommend you. Any member can recommend a new member incl. board members.
2. The member and yourself will then need to find two other members that will support your membership. The member that recommends you will help finding the additional two supporting members.
3. When you have the 3 names, you contact one of the 5 board members and we will put you on the list. You will be able to participate in the next General Assembly if you are on this list. You can contact Kenneth Lavrsen kenneth@lavrsen.dk.
4. One of the first steps at the General Assembly will be to accept the list of new members. This will normally be a formality. Once passed this point you are a full member and can vote for proposals and for the board and even become a member of the board.

For existing members I need to remind that participation at the next General Assembly requires that you have paid your 10 Euro membership fee. Many of you have wanted to, but could not because we had trouble setting up the needed accounts while waiting for German tax authorities. We are fixing this now. But before the January general assembly membership fees must be paid. You will soon receive an email that tells you how you can pay the 10 Euros. Approx 60% of the members have not been able to pay the fee so don’t feel too bad about it. If you already know now that you are not interested, please email Kenneth Lavrsen.

The resources you need.

To find an existing member of the association look at -http://foswiki.org/Community/CurrentFoswikiMembers

The members of the board to send the application to:http://foswiki.org/Community/Association#Board You can e-mail me at kenneth@lavrsen.dk both to be recommended and for the registration.

The association articles can be found at -http://foswiki.org/Community/AssociationArticles – Note that we are in a ping-pong with the German tax authorities about the exact wording of the purpose of the articles but don’t worry. We are not changing to become a football club. It is minor tax technical details that are discussed. It is this tax discussion that has delayed the 2nd general assembly which was supposed to be in November. Please forgive us but we try to avoid having to have an extraordinary assembly.

Regards

Kenneth Lavrsen

Deputy Chair and Secretary of the Foswiki Board.