TWiki Release 4.3 Advocacy

Planned Actions

• 2009-04-30: Release TWiki 4.3 (see helpful BuildingARelease and ProductionReleaseChecklist topics) - Sopan, PTh
• 2009-04-01: Announce at websites - Ann
• 2009-04-01: Announce to twiki-dev - PTh
• 2009-04-02: Send press release to journalists, bloggers, analysts - PTh, Ann, others

TWiki 4.3 Announce Press Release

NOTE: To be released on or after 02 Apr 2009

Headline

TWiki Announces TWiki 4.3 General Availability

Lead

Delivers Enhanced Security, Search and Enterprise Collaboration Capabilities.

TWiki's user base consists of millions of users on 60,000 installations in over 130 countries, backed by an open source community of 4,000 contributors and 40,000 twiki.org users.

Press Release

Sunnyvale, Calif. (April 2, 2009) - TWIKI.NET, the world's leading provider of commercial open source enterprise collaboration, social networking and wiki application development platform, today announced the general availability of TWiki Community Release 4.3, which includes new security, search and enterprise collaboration capabilities for TWiki. The new security enhancement provides added protection against malicious attacks that exploit inherent vulnerabilities in cross-site scripting. Enhanced search capabilities enable TWiki users to perform advanced search, including adding footer parameter and topics to formatted searches. Enhanced enterprise collaboration capabilities provide added newsfeeds to TWiki topics as well as flexible corporate look-and-feel options using built-in TWiki Skin plug-ins.

TWiki Community Edition 4.3 is available at http://twiki.org/download.html. Please visit http://www.twiki.net/ to sign up for a free trial of Certified TWiki Commercial Edition that adds Enterprise Social Networking to TWiki.

Community Support

TWiki.org is an open source community consisting of 4,000 contributors and 40,000 users. The TWiki.org open source development model invites the download and inspection by developers, users and partners, producing a higher quality product than possible in proprietary development environments. TWiki.org operates by a clear set of community governance structure similar to Ubuntu and other leading open source projects. Since its founding by Peter Thoeny in 1998, TWiki.org has been supported by an extensive team of open source software developers around the world. Today, TWiki Community Edition is used by millions of users and is installed in tens of thousands of companies, including the majority of the Fortune 500. TWiki is a mission-critical system at major corporations such as Cisco Systems, Google, Morgan Stanley, Motorola, Nokia, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo!

TWiki Community Release 4.3 Feature Highlights

TWiki 4.3 offers new features and improvements across end-user and administrative functions including:

• Security Enhancements
  • Reduced risk of XSS (cross-site scripting)
  • S/MIME support to sign administrative e-mails

• Usability Enhancements
  • Replace question mark links with red-links to point to non-existing topics

• Enterprise Collaboration Enhancements
  • Pre-installed HeadlinesPlugin to show headline newsfeeds in TWiki topics
  • Pre-installed TWikiNetSkin, TWikiNetSkinPlugin for corporate look and feel

• Search Enhancements
  • Add footer parameter to Formatted Search
  • Add number of topics to Formatted Search

• Miscellaneous Feature Enhancements
  • Control over variable expansion at topic creation time
  • 17 new TWikiDocGraphics images
  • Include URL supports list of domains to exclude from proxy
  • Adding Korean language

• Plugin Enhancements
  • SpreadSheetPlugin: 5 new functions

About TWIKI.NET

TWIKI.NET was founded in 2007 to provide enterprise class collaboration software, support, and services based on open source TWiki, the worlds leading open source enterprise collaboration, social networking and wiki application development platform available in 16 languages, across 130+ countries and used daily by millions of users. The company offers Certified TWiki OnSite for behind-the-firewall deployments. The company also offers TWiki OnDemand, a hosted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enterprise solution for organizations looking to minimize costs associated with hardware and software purchases, maintenance and support. TWiki offers a unique wiki application development environment as it provides robust structured data, scripting and workflow functionalities that enable end users to automate manual business processes without needing expensive IT resources or support. TWiki applications are developed for a wide variety of uses such as project tracking, inventory management, QA bug tracking, sales lead tracking or publishing/editorial management. TWiki applications can also act as portals, community blogs or news feed aggregators, bringing Web 2.0 into the enterprise with user driven content and application logic. TWIKI.NET is committed to supporting the development of open source TWiki and empowering organizations to leverage enterprise collaboration and social networking to achieve a competitive advantage. For more information, call (650) 641-8060 Extension 2, email info@twikiPLEASENOSPAM.net, or visit http://www.twiki.net/.

Contact Information:
media@twikiPLEASENOSPAM.net

TWiki is a registered trademark of Peter Thoeny, TWIKI.NET. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.

-- Contributors: PeterThoeny - 30 Mar 2009

(Those sending out the press release to journalists and bloggers please contact Peter for phone number)

Translations of Press Release

• English (original)
• Deutsch

(included from TWikiPressRelease04x03)

Note: To add another translation, add a bullet in TWikiPressRelease04x03's "Translations of Press Release" section and translate the topic's content.

Advocacy Targets

Advocay done by "PTh" PeterThoeny and "Ann" AnnRuckstuhl. Please help us spread the word of StructuredWikis and situational applications!

TWiki 4.3 To be Announced at Websites

Website	By	Status
Freshmeat.net (link)	PTh	Done
LinuxPR (link)	PTh	Done
SourceForge (link)	PTh	Done
WikiMatrix (link)	PTh	Done

TWiki 4.3 Press Release to be Sent to Trade Publications (Print and Online)

TWiki 4.3 Press Release to be Sent to Analysts

TWiki 4.3 Press Release Sent to Bloggers

E-mail sent to twiki-announce mailing list

From: Peter Thoeny <peter.thoeny.public [at] twiki.net>
To: TWiki-Announce <twiki-announce [at] lists.sourceforge.net>,
    TWiki-Dev list for developers <twiki-dev [at] lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Announcement: TWiki 4.3.0 Production Release
Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 22:26:52 -0700

Dear TWiki administrator:

TWiki 4.3.0 Production Release aka Georgetown Release is
now available for download from the TWiki.org website. The
release offers enhanced security, improved usability, many
new features and adds extensions to strengthen TWiki as an
enterprise collaboration platform. Over 30 bugs have been
fixed since the 4.2.4 release.

It is recommended to upgrade your TWiki 4.2.x to 4.3.0.
We expect TWiki 4.3.0 to be a very stable release because
we avoided extensive code refactor work.

Download the new release from:
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/DownloadTWiki

Note: An upgrade package will be made available in the next
few days.

______________________________________________________________
---++ CHANGES AND UPGRADE

TWiki 4.3 (code named Georgetown) introduces security
enhancements, usability enhancements, feature enhancements,
and adds extensions to strengthen TWiki as an enterprise
collaboration platform.

TWiki is now localized to Bulgarian, Chinese (simplified and
traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French,
German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian,
Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian.

Some highlights of this release:

  * Security Enhancements
     * Reduced risk of XSS (cross-site scripting)
     * S/MIME support to sign administrative e-mails
  * Usability Enhancements
     * Replace question mark links with red-links to point
       to non-existing topics
  * Enterprise Collaboration Enhancements
     * Pre-installed HeadlinesPlugin to show headline
       newsfeeds in TWiki topics
     * Pre-installed TWikiNetSkin, TWikiNetSkinPlugin for
       corporate look and feel
  * Search Enhancements
     * Add footer parameter to Formatted Search
     * Add number of topics to Formatted Search
  * Miscellaneous Feature Enhancements
     * Control over variable expansion at topic creation time
     * 17 new TWikiDocGraphics images
     * Include URL supports list of domains to exclude from
       proxy
     * Adding Korean language
  * Plugin Enhancements
     * SpreadSheetPlugin: 5 new functions

Details are listed in the release notes at
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiReleaseNotes04x03

To upgrade from releases prior to TWiki 4.2.0 follow the
instructions at
http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki04x03/TWikiUpgradeGuide

To upgrade from TWiki 4.2.x we recommend to watch the
download page at
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/DownloadTWiki -- an
upgrade package will be made available in the next few days.

Many people worked on the 4.3 release. I would like to take
this opportunity to thank everybody involved in making this
happen! The change history with contributors is listed at
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiHistory#GeorgetownRelease

______________________________________________________________
---++ WHAT IS TWIKI

TWiki is an open source enterprise Enterprise Wiki and Web
2.0 Application Platform. It is a Structured Wiki, typically
used to run a project development space, a document
management system, a knowledge base, or any other groupware
tool, on an intranet or on the internet. Web content can be
created collaboratively by using just a browser. Users
without programming skills can create web applications.
Developers can extend the functionality of TWiki with plugins.
TWiki gets downloaded over 8,000 times a month.

TWiki.org's mission is to provide a leading enterprise wiki
and application platform. Founded in 1998 by Peter Thoeny and
managed by a team of open-source software engineers around
the world, the TWiki platform is installed and used by
thousands of companies including Google, Motorola, Nokia, SAP
and Yahoo! to increase the productivity of their teams.

TWiki is released as Free Software under the GNU/GPL (General
Public License). TWiki is a registered trademark of Peter
Thoeny, TWIKI.NET.

______________________________________________________________
---++ TWIKI COMMUNITY - GET INVOLVED!

Are you a developer, tech writer or marketeer with interest
in open source? Have you ever participated in an open source
community? It's lots of fun to collaborate on a common goal.
The twiki.org community is looking for new contributors. As a
contributor you can actively make a difference and help shape
the product. To get started:

  * http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/ReadmeFirst
    - for core code
  * http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/ReadmeFirst
    - for plugins
  * http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiMarketing
    - for marketing
  * http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/WebPageAudienceSiteStructure
    - for website redesign

We established a code of conduct and a governance model that
is heavily based on the successful Ubuntu model. More at
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiCodeOfConduct and
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiGovernance.

We have an expanded TWiki Project Charter with many exciting
projects, see
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiCharter and
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiRoadMap

We'd love to get you involved! A good way to get involved is
to participate in release meetings, The next one is at
#twiki_release on Mon, 2009-04-06 17:00 GMT,
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/HelsinkiReleaseMeeting2009x04x06

The development of TWiki extensions gained momentum over the
last 12 month, there are now more than 400 Add-ons, Plugins,
Contribs and Skins available. Check them out; to name a few,
ActionTrackerPlugin, BlackListPlugin, BlogPlugin,
CalendarPlugin, ChartPlugin, DBIQueryPlugin, FormQueryPlugin,
HeadlinesPlugin, HistoryPlugin, MailInContrib,
ProjectPlannerPlugin, TWikiAjaxContrib, TWikiDrawPlugin,
SlideShowPlugin, SpreadSheetPlugin, TagMePlugin,
WorkflowPlugin, WysiwygPlugin, XpTrackerPlugin and more can
be downloaded from
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/WebHome

______________________________________________________________
---++ TWIKI USER COMMUNITY

Wouldn't it be great to meet fellow TWiki champions in your
neighborhood to exchange ideas and best practices? We started
to organize TWiki user meetups in Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen,
Silicon Valley and Zurich. Please organize one in your town
too! Helpful people on twiki.org will assist you. More
on that at http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiMeetUps

______________________________________________________________
---++ TWIKI SUPPORT, SERVICES AND HOSTING

The Support web at TWiki.org is available for people who have
a technical questions or questions about TWiki deployment.
This support forum is for TWiki users by TWiki users. The
TWiki community keeps an eye on postings, but doesn't
necessarily answer questions. In practice, contributors and
users are actively discussing and helping out! Get TWiki
community support at
http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Support/WebHome

If you prefer IRC you can use the #twiki channel on
chat.freenode.net to get in touch with the TWiki community.

A number of consultants provide consulting services to help
you deploy and customize TWiki, see
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiConsultants.

TWIKI.NET at http://www.twiki.net provides support
subscriptions, hosting solutions and training. TWiki user and
champion training help you use the TWiki platform effectively.

______________________________________________________________
---++ TWIKI DEPLOYMENT AND ADVOCACY

TWiki is steadily growing in popularity. It is mainly used
behind corporate firewalls and has grown into a mission
critical system at many major corporations such as Google,
Motorola, Nokia, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo!

In case you installed TWiki on your server you could list it
at http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/TWikiInstallation

Word of mouth is a good way of spreading TWiki - your
help is greatly appreciated! More exposure means more
contributions, and a better system! To promote TWiki in
magazines and web sites use the material in
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiAdvocacy04x03

______________________________________________________________
---++ REQUEST FOR PAPER!

If you have a successful deployment of TWiki, we would really
appreciate if you could support the TWiki project by writing
a TWiki success story. This helps in promoting the platform,
leading to more contributions, and a continuously improving
product! Read more on this at:
http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/TWikiSuccessStories

Last but not least, thanks for contributing many ideas, code,
docs, quality and more!

Best regards and happy TWiki'ing,

Peter, on behalf of the TWiki community

-- Contributors: PeterThoeny - 30 Mar 2009

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