TWiki.org Blog

Incredibly, TWiki is now 10 years young! Although I started TWiki in 1998, the oldest TWiki distribution I found is TWiki19990120.zip, e.g. 20 Jan 1999. TWiki re defined the wiki space from a pure shared publishing platform, to an enterprise wiki, to a web application platform. JostSpot copied the application wiki concept, but was later relaunched as Google Sites with stripped out application programmability. Other wikis follow the TWiki foot steps, such as XWiki and TikiWiki. From the bottom of ... more...

There are some tremendous opportunities for our project. In order to take full advantage of these, today Peter Thoeny and the management team at NET decided to re launch the TWiki.org project with a new governance model. We want to reach out to all community members to explain: why we decided to do this some thoughts on our new top level direction our invitation to re confirm your membership in the community We invite you to participate in this exciting new direction. Please read ... more...

Introduction CPM/PERT diagrams (which Microsoft Project refers to by the ambiguous name of "network diagrams") are useful for planning what needs to be done in what order. Often thought of as a "one off" project planning aid, more generally these precedence diagrams can be used for visualizing recurring procedures like the operations in a manufacturing assembly line, or even a guided procedure for business processes (like on boarding an employee, which can include orientation, provisioning of equipment ... more...

There we go! I would like to announce that there will be the first book about TWiki in German language available from November this year! Being passionate about TWiki since more than one year I thought that TWiki certainly deserves some more attention as it is the greatest Wiki ever! Since the twiki.org website and the documentation are of no real marketing benefit I wrote a book to introduce the power of TWiki to the market. The book starts with installing TWiki to write your first small plugin ... more...

Having just made some positive comments in my last couple of blog posts, I must also, sadly, make some negative ones. The capability of the configure script to import plugins is I think a great advance a great shame I can't use it. My ISP has a certain set structure to its direcotries and my TWiki installationis therefore undera "TWiki" sirectry alongside the "cgi bin". The configure scriptseems to think the subdiredtories of TWiki are at the same level as cgi bin, so it copies the installer scripts ... more...

On the same theme as my last post, we;ve also been able to implement an ISO 9000 compliance monitoring system. We're members of the Professional contractors Group who ahev a scheme which is approved and has many accredited users: http://www.PCGQS.ORG.UK It has its own system, based on an SVN repository, but it didn't have the dynamic capability of a TWIki based system. We've subsituted the static word excel documents the PCG provided with interactive TWiki forms. It's already had a major impact ... more...

A somewhat belated posting. Last year I started to port a number of spreadsheets I had into TWiki. I based topics on someexamples I found on the main TWiki site, such as the account ledger which used a "mashup" of the Spreadsheetplugin the Commentplugin. The result is a number of different tools: a petty cash balance, a mileage caulcator for expenses; a credit card reconciiation; bank statment reconciliation. Obviously, I've used attachmentsto hold scans of invoices to us. It now has an invoicing ... more...

I've fixed a security issue in the TWiki:Plugins.ToolTipPlugin. Any sites using this Plugin should upgrade to the newest version. If your site uses any topic or web view access restrictions, it's especially important to update. The exposure has existed going back at least a couple of years. TWikibug:Item6040 addresses the issue. The fixed plugin is version 17565 (02 Oct 2008) or later. more...

TWIKI as foundation for NEST 1.1 Project Platform Hi TWIKI community! I am Marko "NarsuMan" Rintamäki and I am working at Ixonos PLC (http://www.ixonos.com/en) as Senior Test Engineer/Consultant. I have been using TWIKI now 5 years with a good spirit! I would like to share my "internal feelings" about using TWIKI as foundation for Project Platform :) Background for TWIKI usage Last couple years I've been working with "large" ~70 100 person multisite project where TWIKI has been used as knowledge ... more...

A case study that shows improving the performance of TWIKI has been published on the https://lrwpinjava.dev.java.net/ LRWPinJava website. Glassfish/LRWPinJava improves TWIKI performance more than 2x with 10x less load compared to Apache 1.3/cgi bin on Solaris 10 and T2000, a Sun/SPARC CMT based system. is a J2EE open source Application Server while LRWPinJava is an open source implementation of the http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/WebServices/javaC LRWP/lrwp.html LRWP protocol ... more...

My group in our company had the same problem as all groups: How to coordinate annual holiday for the group members? Recently we used the wall calendar in my office to remember each members holiday plan. After plans had changed, it looked odd. And it worked only inside my office. As we already use TWiki for project management and knowledge base, I looked for a Wiki based solution. I browsed through the rich TWiki plugin area, but nothing fulfilled my wishes. Especially no plugin was able to show ... more...

Gardening, the K. way more...

I just built and released a patch release TWiki 4.2.2 that fixes the following issues found by users: Registration with verification fails in 4.2.1 REVINFO with web specified in topic param renders as though topic does not exist. TWiki::Compatibility has undefined variable error A number of other small issues were resolved, including updating the release process. I Hope this will be the begining of a tradition of creating patch releases as soon as fixes are available. Please go ahead ... more...

In his article, Introducing The Conversation Prism, Brian Solis writes: Over the last month, I worked with Jesse Thomas of JESS3, to create a new graphic that helps chart online conversations between the people that populate communities as well as the networks that connect the Social Web. The Conversation Prism is free to use and share. It's our contribution to a new era of media education and literacy. The conversation map is a living, breathing representation of Social Media and will evolve as ... more...

Here is the release manager's (KennethLavrsen) reflection on TWiki 4.2.1 As release manager for TWiki for almost 3 years I have been managing the releases of quite many TWiki versions now. But the release 4.2.1 is probably the release I have put more heart and energy into and also the release I have felt most pleased with getting finished and made available for our many users. TWiki release 4.2.0 was a significant release feature wise. It introduced a fantastic new Wysiwyg editor. It introduced the ... more...

The TWiki community has just released a big patch release for the newest TWiki version 4.2. In the new release, that can be found at http://www.twiki.org/cgi bin/view/Codev/TWikiRelease04x02x01 both stability and performance have improved . One main focus was to improve the reliability of the WYSIWYG editor : "We have made big improvements with this feature that brings TWiki one more step closer to the community of non tech savvy people." says Kenneth Lavrsen (Motorola), who is in charge of release ... more...

How can you determine if old content is "moldy" (stale) or simply doesn't need to be changed regularly? TWiki is terrific. Anyone can add pages. However, if you don't have a dedicated TWiki librarian, content can become stale. I wanted a relatively easy way to mark "old" pages and ask for feedback: is this content still useful? I installed a custom view template and combined that with a comment form. Pages older than a pre defined date now appear with an extra block of text at the top: Screenshot ... more...

One of the features of Twitter is that it runs 24/7/365. (Un)fortunately, I don't. So, I miss things. I especially miss tweets from people in the "other" hemispheres! I didn't want to miss things, so I looked for a solution. Being a programmer myself, I wanted a solution I could control and tweak if necessary. However, I didn't want to write something from scratch if I didn't have to! Twitter has a popular, published API, so I figured someone would have written what I wanted. Someone did. I found ... more...

Where I work, we have started a page for "new people" in the department. People are added to the page as they join the group. Each person has a section for mini bio and other information and there is a table of contents. The problem: as the page gets larger, it's more difficult to find the entry for a given person. The TOC is ordered by when the person joined. It would be convenient to be able to sort the TOC alphabetically (it's just a list after all) I started looking for ways to sort a list in ... more...

Working with TWiki doesn't need to be big and showy to learn something from it. I did lots of TWiki work last week. 1. I redid our Breadcrumbs in our home TWiki. The default for a subweb is something like CFCL TWiki Projects/Arti WebHome now (using BreadCrumbsPlugin) we have CFCL TWiki Projects Arti WebHome The vs is an artifact but Rich kinda liked it so I'll keep it. 2. I put our TopicTree code into our Shared topics so it's standardized. I also added a subwebs ... more...

There has been progress towards making the Web properly Read Write at Universal Edit Button site. TWiki.org and Bugs site have been Universal Edit Button enabled all you need to do is install the addin, and you see a Wiki Edit Icon in the Firefox URL input box. Editing then becomes as simple as clicking on the icon in the toolbar! I have checked in the template changes needed to the twiki 4.2.1 branch, but if you're impatient to see it working for your TWiki apply the patch attached to this Blog ... more...

In our company with several geographically dispersed teams, we found it challenging to keep up with who our coworkers are in other offices. Another challenge was that when a new person was hired, that information often did not reach the people who needed it in order to prepare for the new employee's arrival. There are preparations to be made, such as having their computer configured, having benefits and other company information packets ready for them, and having basic orientation or training ready ... more...

I have recently been creating a number of TWiki pages that contain multiple variations on very similar code; e.g., many twisties like this one: %TWISTY{mode "div" showlink "schema info" hidelink "schema info" showimgleft "" hideimgleft "" }% where the only difference is the showlink/hidelink text. As a programmer, I don't like to repeat code. I prefer to write a function, use a macro, or set a variable. (Repeat Yourself). I asked the TWiki Community for suggestions in GenericMacroProcessing ... more...

TWiki will be presented at Libre Software Meeting / Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre 2008 in Mont de Marsan (France) on 3rd of July. TWiki is used by Espace Mendès France , in Poitiers (France), to publish contents and manage the association's projects and help in its governance. ThierryPasquier will provide feedback on this experiment conducted since 2005, in the presentation he will make at LSM. Libre Software Meeting are an opportunity for all sort of public to come together around the ... more...

Perhaps you've heard of Twitter, the microblogging service that lets you stay in touch with friends, old and new, by web, IM, or SMS. Twitter lets you tell others what you're doing in 140 character chunks. Recently, TWiki has joined the Twitter crowd. If you're not quite ready to write a full blog entry you might still have thoughts and comments to share about TWiki. What are you using TWiki for? Have you recently solved a problem? Why not use Twitter? We have two Twitter users: @twikiorg and ... more...

Show the world "It's in TWiki". Wear a TWiki t shirt! Choose your style. Available in the Shop. Read more about what the community is doing about making merchandise available at TWikiMerchandise. more...

As a knowledge management system and employee portal, a Wiki is of incalculable value within the company network, fueling the Intranet motor. In an Intranet, standard functions and killer applications are effective Standard functions include, for example, employee search, forums, and document management. In addition to these, so called killer applications are spurring on the Intranet. The term was coined by Jakob Nielsen and describes applications that keep the Intranet running and necessary. These ... more...

The upcoming quarterly Silicon Valley TWiki User Meet up is scheduled for Fri, 16 May 2008 05:30 PM. Please reserve the date and RSVP at TWikiMeetUpInSiliconValley. This will be our third event where you can mingle with fellow TWiki users, share fun/useful stuff you have done with TWiki, and exchange best practices. Please spread the word! NET is organizing the event and is sponsoring food and drink. We are currently looking for a venue at a Silicon Valley company that is using TWiki. Please watch ... more...

Next Friday afternoon will be the second TWiki meetup in Holland. We will be guests at the technical university in Delft, at the department of policy and management. If you haven't already, indicate your presence on the RSVP list. Where the first meetup proved to be very short with just 2 hours, this second meetup will have the possibility to run longer, with lots of room for discussion and knowledge exchange. We will kick off with a general overview of the state of TWiki: what is the community working ... more...

As part of the 2008 Wiki Tuesdays Guest Speaker Series, Adrian Fritsch (Software Consultant and founder of debatum.org) will lead discussions at Toronto Wiki Tuesday at Epicure Cafe. This is a cross posting. Here's Adrian's event description: What: Toronto Wiki Tuesdays: using Wikis to Debate The problem To form a well reasoned opinion, you need the best arguments on different sides of a debate. Wikipedia stresses neutral point of view and so make it's content hard to contrast with your current ... more...

Sometimes we get the question on how well TWiki can scale. This blog post compiles scalability related information so that you can plan your TWiki deployment effectively. Scaling Across Teams and Departments TWiki was designed as an enterprise wiki from its inception. You find features specifically designed to support large deployments. Other wiki engines have a different focus and may lack some of these features. Wikis typically flourish in grassroots. Once at the radar screen of the CTO/CIO, grassroots ... more...

Within an Intranet, Wikis are a good means for the quick and uncomplicated collecting of information that is needed for the long term; this creates a base of knowledge as well as a platform for communication that is always available to the participating employees. The following Top Ten reasons are arguments for why every Intranet should have its own Wiki. 1. Slowing of the e mail flood It is true that e mail inboxes function as extensive knowledge storage areas, but they often go unused; in addition ... more...

Sometime ago I started TWikiStandAlone project and one of the first problems I faced was "which code base should I use?" Since I would create a branch, I thought about to use 4.1.2, the last stable release at that time, but this approach had some problems: Some changes I needed was already performed at MAIN branch, but not at 4.1.2 When finished, it would be difficult to merge with MAIN On the other hand, if I had created a branch from MAIN, how could I keep it in sync? How could I merge ... more...

I already wrote a post about TWikiStandAlone project, but after I read the minutes from GeorgetownReleaseMeeting2008x03x03, I realized many people could be thinking "Cool, but what is the benefit for me?" . So I'll try to answer this question. The standard way to run TWiki is as a CGI script. It's easy to setup and many web servers and hosting services support it. But it's also slow and resource hungry. There are some hacks and discussions about using things like ModPerl and PersistentPerl (aka ... more...

My use for TWiki is for an installation, on an intranet, where users don't have to re enter their passwords (or worse still have yet another to remember). I now have a few months' experience of running TWiki using Microsoft's IIS to handle all issues of user authentication. For brief notes on the installation steps used, please see: Installing TWiki on Windows, using IIS and Cygwin. more...

The TWiki development team asks for customer feedback for the following proposal. TWiki has a documented feature that allows the admin to setup TWiki at installation so that the revision control file (the files that ends with ,v) are placed in subdirectories. We have received the first and only bug report that says it does not work. The reason for the feature was to allow twice the number of topics in a web but we are not sure any longer that the feature really gives the needed performance boost ... more...

More and more, TWiki enthousiasts around the globe are getting together to share experiences and talk about TWiki and how it is being used. These meetups are a great way to see what TWiki is capable of. Among the more succesful series are the Silicon Valley meetups, which have been blogged about on this same blog a number of times. In april, the second Dutch TWiki meetup will take place. The first meet up was a success, although a bit short. It turns out we have enough to talk about to warrant a ... more...

TWiki is one of the most powerful application wikis around and, with over 2 million users, it is also one of the most widely used. The trouble is, the mainstream media haven't picked this up yet and so TWiki remains one of the internet's best kept secrets. YouTube, on the other hand, is in a completely different place. It is the number 2 site on the internet and over 100 million videos get watched every day. Many companies use its high profile to promote their own products and services. We could ... more...

The February Community Summit meeting was followed, on Friday night, by an open TWiki User Meetup. Approximately 35 TWiki users and interested parties convened to eat pizza and learn more about TWiki. Five people gave short presentations, either of sites they've implemented in TWiki, projects they would like to see implemented, or nifty TWiki capabilities There was time before and after the presentations for networking and general discussion. Presentations Kenneth Lavrsen Motorola site demo ... more...

On Thursday and Friday, Feb 14/15, I attended the TWiki Community Summit in Sunnyvale, CA. The location and and wireless internet access for the meeting were provided by Yahoo!. The Summit meetings were followed, on Friday night, by an open TWiki User Meetup. 14 people attended at least part of the Sunnyvale Summit, either in person or via conference call and IRC. It was clearly noted that the purpose of the Summit is to brainstorm ideas and strategy, not to make any "final" decisions. The agenda ... more...

I have just uploaded the OpenIDUserContrib for TWiki 4.2.0. It adds OpenID login and 1.1 Attribute functionalty to TWiki. Currently, it disables Registration, and limits authentication to OpenID users. It has the advantage over the nop OpenIDAuth apache module, that it automatically requests the User's nop OpenId 1.1 attributes like Name, Email address directly from their nop OpenID identity. While it trusts the user's choice of 'FullName' registration attribute when displaying who made changes ... more...

TWiki 4.2.0 was released on the 22nd of January 2008. I have now updated the Windows, OSX Tiger, Centos 4 5 and Fedora Core 5 7 installers. Stay tuned for the installer source release. more...

We had a wonderful first Silicon Valley TWiki User's Meet Up at Plug and Play Tech Center Thursday night (Nov 29). More than 50 TWiki users were in attendance and highlights from the evening included a superb presentation by Vicki Brown of Yahoo! and Guy Martin of Motorola Open System Technology, among others. Vicki Brown explained how Yahoo!'s TWiki site had grown to incredible richness with 318,000 live pages, more than 10,000 users, 5 MILLION page views per month and more than 500,000 TWiki page ... more...

Sparked by the emergence of NET, a new commercial entity delivering enterprise class TWiki services, the debate of a TWiki Foundation has been reopened. NET has TWiki founder Peter Thoeny. Another player in the field of commercial TWiki services that already existed is WikiRing, a brand/partnership founded by some of the most active and long term contributors to TWiki. This begs the question: is TWiki.org able to hold its own as an independent project? If we want to guarantee that the answer to this ... more...

The release 4.2.0 is closer than ever. With the RC2 and the very short list of release blockers of which most are documentation and confirmation of fixes things are starting to look very good and a release is very close. TWiki has an impressive number of Plugins. Many are now outdated because a better plugin has been made or the core code has adopted the function. But there are at least 100 maybe close to 200 that will be relevant to many. The TWiki plugin repository is one of the major strengths ... more...

Today, I built and uploaded to TWikiRelease04x02x00rc2 the second and hopefully final Release Candidate for TWiki 4.2.0. This release is already quite stable, with reports from a surprising number of companies that have chosen to upgrade their production TWiki's to beta 3, to benefit from the the updated PatternSkin, improved user management API, query SEARCH, and very importantly, the new TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor integration. With the release bug arrival rate slowing down, we're now focusing on testing ... more...

Today, I built and uploaded to TWikiRelease04x02x00rc1 the first Release Candidate for TWiki 4.2.0. This release is already quite stable, with reports from a surprising number of companies that have chosen to upgrade their production TWiki's to beta 3, to benefit from the the updated PatternSkin, improved user management API, query SEARCH, and very importantly, the new TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor integration. We are now in full string freeze, to allow our translators a stable base to work from. Try ... more...

A Long, Long Time Ago RafaelAlvarez contributed a REST architecture for TWiki that until relatively recently had been largely ignored. That's a shame, because TWiki has fallen behind the curve on effective interaction, partly because it is so difficult and inefficient to interact with TWiki from Javascript. More recently we have been able to re architect big sections of the core to make REST more useful. Writing a REST script still isn't all that easy, however. This post is intended to try and make ... more...

I'm a undergraduate computer science student from University of Bahia and I worked with TWiki administration at Science Department and at Brasil. I like TWiki a lot, but I'm a little frustrated with its performance and resource consumption. Many times I had to kill apache (sometimes I had also to reboot server) cause of "out of memory" errors. I started to test alternatives, such as SpeedyCGI and ModPerl. I tried also FastCGI but I didn't get it to work. Performance raise with ModPerl is fantastic ... more...

Some observations from your release manager. Quality We have 19 urgent bugs open. We have 86 normal bugs open We are not able to release a release candidate yet. Next will be a beta 3 The hall of fame currently says that the top 5 bug fixers since 4.1.2 are Crawford Currie 150 Arthur Clemens 56 Sven Dowideit 49 Kenneth Lavrsen 42 Steffen Poulsen 12 We need more giving a hand getting the bugs fixed. Or at least help analysing the bug and point ... more...

I'm a systems administrator and programmer at a non for profit working closely with civilian agencies in the US. The organization as a whole is interested in Wikis. I have been able to successfully champion wikis (specifically TWiki) within my own division and among the people I work with. The first successful TWiki deployment was a large survey application for a government agency. We were able to mold the site using skins and templates into a sleek interface. Auto generated index pages provided ... more...

Last night I went to the Wednesdays' October event in San Francisco. KQED, the Public Radio/TV for Northern California, gave a presention on how they use TWiki in a structured way to manage the program. "QUEST is a TV, radio, web, and education series by KQED that explores science, environment and nature in Northern California." The program runs for 3 years and will produce 60 TV features and 48 radio features per year, as well as daily blogs and http://www.flickr.com/search/?q kqedquest photo ... more...

TWiki 4.2.0 beta 2 has been built and uploaded. Please try it out, we're pretty close to releasing :). To make life even easier, I've also updated the Windows Installer, and added Mac OSX, Centos 4 5 and Fedora Core 5 7 installers. more...

TWiki uses alot of static files, and util we implement the magic js and css minify we've been talking about for a while, you can reduce the load on your apache server, and increase the aparent speed of your user's experience, by setting the Expires HTTP header for static files to 'quite large'. Because TWiki.org has an obvious cyclic usage profile view mrtg graph, and because we're likely to upgrade the server to 4.2.0 in the comming months, I've settled on ExpiresDefault "access plus 11 days ... more...

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Release 4.2.0 Beta 1: zip tgz installer We have begun the count down to a new TWiki Release. For people wanting to help test the releases, there are nightly builds uploaded to nightly build area. As things stablize, I will then build a beta release, and upload it to TWiki.org. Please , report any bugs you notice, even ones you can't quite reproduce to TWiki bugs system and mark as Urgent. These bugs will then be worked on, or downgraded as appropriate to this release. We are also collecting bug ... more...

If you are scanning one of the current indexes (WebTopicList and WebIndex) for a specific topic you have no idea which other topics are related e.g. which topics are child topics. With the help of TreePlugin you can easily turn your index into a sitemap. As you can see in the screenshot all topics are displayed by hierarchy and alphabet. How To: The top level topic in this example is the WebHome (renamed in this example). Therefore the WebHome needs to be the root of all topics in ... more...

As an experiment, more to see if it was possible or not, I just extended %SECTION to support an "if" type and an ELSE clause. This lets you write something like this: FLUB is defined FLUB is not defined Fun, eh? The syntax is rather clumsy, but it shows how easy it is to add something like this. It's basically what the IfDefinedPlugin does, if I'm not much mistaken, but with syntax consistent with the rest of the core. The syntax is evaluated after verbatim and literal sections are protected ... more...

In last night's TWiki release meeting I was asked for some detail on some of the design decisions I made during the WYSIWYG development for TWiki. Rather than answer them piecemeal on IRC, I decided to write this topic. Ask any detailed questions in replies, and I'll try and answer them. You never know, we might uncover a better approach! How "Javascript editors" work Modern browsers all have some way of editing HTML in the browser. That means there are some functions for handling mouse movements ... more...

The success of the TWikiCommunitySummitRome2007 inspired those present in having lots of local meet ups. Rome clearly showed how inspiring and helpful face to face meetings are. Besides, it is also fun to meet your fellow TWiki administrators, developers, contributors and users. A meetup can be anything, from an informal meeting in your local pub once every while to an organized event with renowned speakers. You, as a TWiki community member, make the meetings. So far, active interest has been expressed ... more...

On august 15th 16th the first ever TWiki community summit was held in Rome. The event was sponsered by NET, the recently introduced provider of a commercial, certified TWiki distribution. The summit was attended by 12 people, among which a large number of long time contributors. All attendants left the meeting with a very positive feeling, which is not surprising given the constructive dialogues and important decisions made. One of those decisions, of which this article is the first result, is ... more...