TWiki.org Blog

I joined the TWiki project at the time Cairo was released. Cairo was a relatively stable program. It had a few bugs which you could fix with a couple of patches but overall it was stable. TWiki 4.0 (Dakar) was a major rewrite and also a release with quite many bugs. But the community was fast at reacting with 4.0.1, 4.0.2, 4.0.3, 4.0.4. TWiki 4.1.0 (Edinburgh) was also followed up by 4.1.1 and 4.1.2. With 4.2.0 we got again some major code refactorings. And as always bugs surfaced. But this time the commitment to fixing bugs seems at an all time low. And it is not because people do not have time. Codev is glowing with ideas of major refactorings and new features. And plugins are being updated. But the core code is stalled and the list of urgent ... 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 are specific to each company and are a result of the individual performance of a company, for instance, in the form of databases. Killer applications are special processes and procedures depicted as web applications and embedded in the Intranet ... 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 the RSVP page for updates. We are looking forward meeting many TWiki aficionados! If you are interested in getting notified of future TWiki Meet ups in the Silicon Valley you can subscribe to the TWikiUsersSFBayMailingList at http://lists.sourceforge ... 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 on at the moment, the current roadmap for the future, and more. Following that there will be at least two interesting presentations: one about TWiki in an educational context and another about a public TWiki site where it is used as a CMS like ... 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 understanding. While every wiki houses content, a method is needed to help the community express contrasting opinions. The Debatum solution Debatum is a wiki with a method that guides uses to document and interconnect arguments. Examples it uses ... 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 wikis often get consolidated into a central TWiki. That is when scalability comes into play. Key scaling features of TWiki: Multiple webs (workspaces): You can create as many webs as you need. Some large TWiki deployments have ... 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, only the user has access to it. The management of documents and e mail attachments is also particularly time consuming as it costs valuable resources to search constantly for older e mails within the filing systems to distribute further. In ... 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 fixes and updates from MAIN to the branch? SVN is cool, but it's not good to look for each revision I'd like to merge. I had a fast conversation about it with SvenDowideit and we agreed that git was a good tool for this kind of situation. However ... 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 SpeedyCGI), but I don't think they are that easy to use currently and some stability problems may appear. The initial proposal of TWikiStandAlone project, as name says, was to turn TWiki into a standalone server, so that could be performance benefits ... 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. We now need to decide if we fix the feature or remove it. Unless we hear from customers that need it we intend to remove it from TWiki 5.0 (assumed release in 2009). Upgraders that use the feature (if it ever worked) can upgrade by simply moving all ... 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 lengthy session! Meanwhile, the Danish have had their first meetup with the next planned in september 2008. If you're in Canada , do check out the page on meetups in the Toronto area. Next to these national initiatives, some more trans national ... 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 do this too. All we need are some TWiki videos for !YouTube. This is where you come in. The fact that you are reading this means that you have an interest in TWiki and, if you do, you have probably got a TWiki video inside you just waiting to ... 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 Lynwood Brown Customer site demo KRS Murthy Proposed "Music DJ" demo Catherine Chat and Cyril Bousquet TWiki plus SharePoint Rich Morin How INCLUDEs can be leveraged Attendees voted on the presentations. Kenneth and Lynwood ... 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 of the two day Sunnyvale Summit covered: Introductions TWiki Business Model, Governance, and the Decision Making Process. Who are the "teams"" inside the TWiki Community? (The "core" team needs to be renamed and re evaluated.) TWiki ... 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 OpenIDAuth apache module, that it automatically requests the User's OpenId 1.1 attributes like Name, Email address directly from their OpenID identity. While it trusts the user's choice of 'FullName' registration attribute when displaying who made changes to topics, the TWiki topic source actually stores the authenticating OpenID URI, thus their user details will be updated from the authentication server next time they log in. Note that TWiki Topic based Groups are not yet implemented using this Mapper. Future directions ... 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 edits per month. This is perhaps one of the largest and most successful wiki and collaboration platform implementations in the world. She showed some of the TWiki programming "magic" she had developed to help manage the growth and evolution of the ... 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 question will remain to be a resounding yes, I believe it is necessary to give the project body with a non profit: the TWiki Foundation. The debate is not new, as can be seen in the history of the TWikiFoundation topic. Revision one is dated 09 April ... 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 TWiki seen as a project and as a product. If you are a plugin writer or a plugin user that has tested 4.2 betas or RCs you can make a positive difference to the 4.2 release. To the plugin writers With any new release of TWiki there is a risk ... 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 the edges of the release, re checking performance and generally trying to find new use cases. Please help us by installing this release and using it on a copy of your live TWiki's data to make sure that it works on your TWiki (and report how ... 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 out the latest release of the very first and most feature packed Enterprise Wiki. 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 it easier. See the article for the full gory details of what REST is. TWiki developers can think of a REST as a way of calling a single function in a a plugin, in a place where TWiki::Func is available. REST handlers are designed primarily to be ... 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, but it uses tons of memory, so it didn't solve my problem. !SpeedyCGI is very fast too and I thought it was the solution to all problems! But I started to face some instability: user X tries to edit topic A, but contents of topic B, being edited ... 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 to the code where the bug is. That makes it easier for the top 5 to fix code and unit tests. A good analysis of a bug item is 90% of the fix. We all know that number 1 Crawford has huge challenges on the new Wysiwyg editor (which could use more sponser ... 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 navigation through the use of nested formatted Searches and the ever useful Spreadsheet plugin. Because TWiki is open, we were able to make a few point modifications to add necessary formatting features to the form system. We were also easily able to ... 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 albums on Flickr. Craig Rosa, the interactive producer of QUEST, and Lauren Sommer, the wiki champion first gave an overview of QUEST, and then explained how their structured wiki approach solved their needs. Usually, the TV folks and radio folks work ... 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" . you may need to turn on the mod expires module in your apache's httpd.conf, but the rest of the settings can be put into the .htaccess file in the pub directory. #this prevents clients from re requesting at all, freeing up apache to serve what what ... 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 reports that will be used to make up the followup 4.2.1 patch release. For developers, please switch to the release branch, do your editing, unit test runs and commits to there, and then merge to branch. For those of you with MAIN checkouts you can ... 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 your web. To get all the Web Topic out of the normal list I introduced a topic called "SystemSeiten" (which means !SystemTopis) This topic becomes root topic of all topics that start with Web . To keep the indexes in the TWIKIWEB ... 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, just before the startRenderingHandler , and before any other TWiki variables are evaluated. This means that any TWiki variables inside the failing side of the condition are never evaluated. So you can't "build" a %SECTION{type "if" out of other ... 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 over a rendered DOM, and operations for manipulating the DOM itself. The most widely adopted API is Midas, formalised by Mozilla but rooted in IE. Midas is fairly well supported in IE and Mozilla, and partially in newer Safari versions, but the API ... 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 for a TWikiMeetUpInGermany and a TWikiMeetUpInHolland. Completely in line with the wiki philosophy, you can organise your own TWiki meetup. Just check out who the TWiki people in your neighbourhoud are and invite them over to the pub, your place ... 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 to install a number of TWiki blogs on the TWiki.org website. These blogs (and a derived newsletter) will provide users and contributors alike with a 'the current state of TWiki' at a glance. This feature has been lacking. Discussion around new features ... more...