Minutes of TWiki Kampala Release Meeting, 2013-10-24

Logistics, Participants, IRC log

• Date: Thursday, 2013-10-24 22:00 GMT (Convert to your time zone)
• Location: TWiki IRC channel #twiki_release on Freenode IRC (web-based IRC)

• Previous release meeting: JerusalemReleaseMeeting2013x10x10
• Next release meeting: KampalaReleaseMeeting2013x11x07

• Log of IRC meeting: KampalaMeetingLog2013x10x24.txt

• Participants
  • PeterThoeny ( PeterThoeny )
  • HideyoImazu ( himazu )
  • two-
  • VickiBrown ( Vicki )
  • MichaelGulitz ( MichaelGulitz )
  • DipuDeshmukh ( dipu )
  • MichaelSevero ( msevero )
  • MahiroAndo ( MahiroAndo )
  • YaojunFei ( YaojunFei )
  • ThomasGutzmann ( ThomasGutzmann )
  • PeterJones ( PeterJones)
  • RichMorin ( Vicki )
  • EnriqueCadalso ( EnriqueCadalso )
  • IanKluft ( ko6yq-lt )
  • JiahaoWang
• Facilitated by PeterThoeny
• Notes taken by PeterThoeny

1. TWiki-6.0 Release Post-Mortem

• Desired outcome: Identify action items to improve the release focus

• TWiki-6.0.0 was released on 2013-10-14, and announced on 2013-10-22, blog post.
• We got mentions by two German Linux magazines, mentions are tracked at TWikiInTheNews.
• Release went really well, no issues, no new bugs so far.
• Pending item on 6.0.0 release: Build TWiki-VM image.
  • PTh is working on it - goal to use latest CentOS 6
• Big workload on PTh, he updated 1000+ topics on TWiki.org this month and 600+ topics on develop.twiki.org.
  • Goal to distribute work on next release.

2. Release Focus of Next Release

• Brainstorming on where the focus should be for the KampalaRelease

• Need to define KampalaRelease
  • Previous one is at JerusalemRelease
• High level release focus:
  • Better app platform
  • Better usability
  • Better performance

• Better app platform:
  • TWiki app packaging standard & TWikiAppInstaller

• Better usability:
  • TWiki doesn't seem to appeal enough to non technical people
  • Drag and drop an image into the WYSIWYG editor, and also in attach screen
  • Evaluators are typically administrators and technical; they expect point and click administration
    • But preferences settings and access control are still a bit too difficult
    • Improving the PreferencesPlugin for point & click using jQuery & Ajax
  • Google docs are pretty much the standard/expectation nowadays; that is, we should strive to have at least as good capabilities
    • WYSIWYG editor: Get rid of the round trip of TinyMCE retrieving the page content
    • Missing gap: Calendar and spreadsheet
    • Calendar: Prettify TWiki calendar and make it more usable with point & click events, more views (not just monthly), export iCal data
    • Spreadsheet: We have all the power and more but not the usability
      • Goal: Have a sexy looking spreadsheet like Google Docs or Excel
      • Need functional combination of EditTablePlugin and SpreadSheetPlugin where a lot of the magic happens in Javascript
      • Fronted magic, possibly use the DataTables jQuery plugin

• Better performance:
  • Goal: Speed-up queries and page load to 1 sec
  • The RepositoryForSiteAndWebMetadata is promising, could be enhanced as topic metadata cache
  • What to cache of TWiki topics:
    • topic meta
    • form meta
    • attachment meta
    • topic summary
    • headings cache
    • wikiword links cache
  • Make this optional, e.g. turning on feature will start caching meta data, and if turned on and copying a web from backup or another TWiki, start caching meta data
  • Repository should be optimized for view, can be slower for update
  • Need atomic & transactional behavior in case of killed script or browser crash

3. Feature Requests for Kampala Release

• Desired outcome: Discuss and decide on pending feature request that need attention
• See TWikiFeatureProposals

• (skipped)

4. Review Urgent and Not So Urgent Bugs

• Desired outcome: Identify must fixes
• See TWikibug:ReleaseBlocker and TWikibug:DetailedItemsQuery

• (skipped)

5. Extensions

• Desired outcome: Get everyone in sync, coordinate enhancements
• See WebChanges in Plugins web

• (skipped)

6. Miscellaneous

• (none)

Back to: KampalaRelease

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