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 \{\} \;
Crawford Currie Development
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:
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 
Sven Dowideit Misc
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:
- Preference variables can take parameters now. This allows to build very powerful macro shortcuts to ease the life of your content editors.
- JQueryPlugin had a major release in its own allowing new possibilities for smart user interaction for the application developer.
- There’s a new custom-made jQuery-ui theme providing a decent look&feel for enterprise use.
- SpreadSheetPlugin has been enhanced with new functions.
- Significant enhancements were made to the Foswiki email implementation. These changes increase compatibility with email services like Google’s gmail, adding support for SMTP over SSL as well as S/MIME signed mail.
Read up all the details on the full release notes.
The Foswiki team wishes you quiet and relaxing Christmas holidays. See you next year.
Michael Daum Release Development, foswiki, Release
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 …
Michael Daum Promo camp, cern, community, foswiki
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!
Crawford Currie Development
