Cool. Foswiki was mentioned in an Enterprise 2.0 study from Centrestage.
The Foswiki community summit last year was a big success. A lot of participants founded an association and had a lot of fun. Some of them talked to me on the camera. Hear and see what they had to say about foswiki:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=62E3314371503C9DCebit has proven to be the most important event for the IT branche again with over 4,100 companies from 68 countries. For the first time, Foswiki was part of this mega event kindly invited on the booth of the Perl Foundation. This has been a very positive experience talking to a lot of people about Foswiki, Perl and Open Source in general.
It really was a pleasure to meet the Perl::Staff. I’ve been talking to Gabor Szabo and he outlined his idea of a new foundation to promote Perl on a more professional level in order to overcome its somewhat geeky reputation. So the Foswiki community as well as companies using Foswiki – and with it Perl – might have an interest to participate in a campaign to promote Perl in a way similar to what we see for PHP, by installing a kind of “Proud Perl User” banner people could download for their website, by participating on Perl-related conferences and events. I think that this is a really good idea to build up a kind of network among Perl users and projects to mutually boost popularity of Open Source projects.
Compared to Perl as a programming language, Foswiki has got additional vectors to promote itself, and these haven’t been followed with the required intensity yet.
That’s one of the reasons I went around the Open Source campus and visited the Joomla! booth. I was quite impressed how well organized their booth was including excellent handouts and brochures. I talked to one of the developers there to learn more about their own Joomla! e.V.. While Perl as well as PostgreSQL, Koffice and 12 other Open Source projects were located on the Open Source Projets Lounge sponsored by the Linux New Media AG, projects like Joomla and Open Office were able to fund a booth of their own.
So I contacted Britta Wülfing from Linux New Media AG how and when the next Call for Projects will take place for Cebit 2011. The rules are quite simple, mostly you don’t have to sleep away the deadline (grrr). There have been about 60 submissions this year with 15 projects being accepted by a committee. Only projects that did not exhibit the year before were accepted.
I talked to Renee Bäcker and Andreas Scherbaum about Cebit 2011 and the idea to share a booth among the three projects of us which is kind of a good middle ground between finding a sponsor for a pure Foswiki booth and being accepted by chance on behalf of the Linux New Media AG.
Then I met Chris Hofmann from the Mozilla Foundation who gave a talk at the Open Source Forum next to the Perl booth about the history of Netscape and the emerge of the Mozilla Application Suite. I took the chance and talked to him about other browser vendor’s adoption of HTML5 and the File API as recently been implemented in Firefox 3.6. As we know, uploading files is an important part of nowaday’s web applications. The new File API will make this a lot easier. Meanwhile projects like Plupload do a great job walking between the worlds of Flash, Silverlight, Gears and good old HTML4 based uploading providing a very elegant way to test and fallback to the different backends. So the landscape is pretty much shifting. Too bad that Google abandoned Gears out of a sudden. Things are not always proceeding forward, judging from this point in time.
Overall, Oliver and I would really like to repeat this experience on different occasions as exhausting as it was, and last but not least plan ahead for Cebit 2011 early enough.
Meanwhile, Oliver will organize a booth on the FrOSCon in August this year and meet Renée again together with the other guys of the Perl::Staff.
Release of Foswiki version 1.0.9, 17 Jan 2010
On behalf of the entire Foswiki community I can proudly announce the
release of the Foswiki patch release 1.0.9
Foswiki 1.0.9 is available for download from foswiki.org/Download/
Foswiki 1.0.9 was built 17 Jan 2010. It is a patch release with more
than 320 bug fixes relative to 1.0.0 and many small enhancements. This
release fixes many bugs in the Wysiwyg editor, bugs related to more
advanced wiki applications and bugs in the Plugin API. It contains
several bug fixes and enhancements related to security and spam fighting.
It is highly recommended to upgrade your Foswiki to 1.0.9.
The regular version (Foswiki-1.0.9…) is the full version with all
files. The upgrade version (Foswiki-upgrade-1.0.9…) contains the full
file package except the files that you will typical have tailored in
your installation and do not want overwritten when you upgrade. The
upgrade package will upgrade any version from 1.0.0 or later to 1.0.9
simply by copying all the files in the upgrade package on top of the
existing 1.0.X. The exact steps are described on the download page. If
you are at 1.0.0 there is no need to upgrade to 1.0.4 through 1.0.8 first.
Also note that many plugins and other extensions are being released or
updated every week. Follow the Extensions News at where important news
about extensions releases are announced.
foswiki.org/Extensions/ExtensionNews
The number of subversion code check-ins is over 6000 now and still more
developers join the project.
As release manager on the project I want to say a sincere thank you to
all the many that have worked hard on this release happen. A special
thank you to those that tested the two release candidates. Remember that
you can upgrade also the release candidates using the upgrade package.
You should also both when you download and install Foswiki and regularly
visit foswiki.org/Support/KnownIssuesOfFoswiki01×00 where we will
list the more annoying bugs that have been found and most often you will
find an immediate solution that you can apply.
We will be many developers that are ready to help you with the
installation of (or upgrade to) Foswiki on the IRC channel #foswiki on
the freenode.org network.
The special installer and virtual machine versions of Foswiki will be
updated to 1.0.9 version within the next days. Keep an eye on the
download page if you use one of these versions.
On behalf of the Foswiki Association and the entire Foswiki Community:
Enjoy the Foswiki 1.0.9
Kenneth Lavrsen
Release manager
I just read a list of good arguments from Colas Nahaboo for Foswiki on the Foswiki mailing list and wanted to post them here quickly:
Our Foswiki at work (ILOG, then IBM) is in place since 2001, and has now 60,000 pages. In my view, the main strengths of Foswiki wrt mediawiki are:
- Utter reliability: it can run unattended for months without a worry, it relies only on the filesystem. And if the filesystem is on a NAS…. automatic continous backup for free!
- Resilience: it survived problems such as no more disk space, power outages, hard disk failures with no damage nor corruptions
- Integration: you can use Foswiki pages as front-end applications to services, or as display of programs results, as the engine just handle text files that are easy to handle or generate by any scripting language you like. For instance we use a separate search engine (now a Google appliance) to provide full text searching.
- Power: If you are used to the unix way of thinking (data is defined as simple text in files, and you use shell/perl/python/ruby/C/… scripts to manage them) then any kind of feature can be added to Foswiki as the engine is geared to having its data files changed by other processes too, thanks to its dynamic nature. The great feature of Foswiki is that users can code a feature via Foswiki Macros, and other users can copy/paste/enhance this code which is not hidden like the php of Mediawiki extensions.
- On the performance problems, the main drawback of this dynamicity is that a lot of things are recomputed on each requests, e.g. some ”macros” in Foswiki that search in pages can be slow. But things can be optimised quite a bit by separating the contents into different directories, and coding special scripts or plugins to optimize the bottlenecks. Flat files are not slow per se (a grep in our 60,000 pages takes 10 seconds), it is just that we lack now the equivalent of ”indexes” you have with a database. But the community is working on this.
I would add that whether you choose Mediawiki or Foswiki, your technical team is expected to invest some time to understand how the system works. I guess in the end the decisive factor is whether your people are more at ease with php+mysql or with traditional Unix scripting.
Colas
Read the whole mail-conversation including a happy ending here on our Nabble-documentation online.
Did you know that the Foswiki community is actively trying to create a complete new interaction design for you and your users. Especially Arthur Clemens and Carlo Schulz are actively creating concepts how the Foswiki surface can be improved and be more easily to understand and use.
A lot of community members think that usability improvements for Foswiki are one of the most important ways to increase Foswikis adoption within your company and within the market.
If you want to help us, please comment on these drafts and help us to understand, what you and your users need.
You can find discussions and much more information on the progress in our Wiki under RethinkingTopicInteraction (incl. all pictures) and RethinkingTopicInteractionPrototype. Please tell us, what you think.
Foswiki summit begins today and lasts until tomorrow. Did you know that you can participate from your home computer remotely? Yes, you can.
One goal of the Foswiki community is to be open and transparent. That’s why we try to incorporate all technical means available to help you join the summit from your remote desktop.
Here is what you can do:
That is where we expect the most activity and documentation, because this is the channel we use most often in the day-to-day community communication. Here is how you can get on our IRC channel.
We will try to document and update the wiki regularly. You can monitor these changes by looking at all changes in all webs.
Some of the summit’s participants are fond of Google Wave and will try to use it for our conference live documentation in addition to other channels. Find all public Google Waves about Foswiki here.
The service etherpad.com offers live text collaboration that is much faster than Google Wave and more powerful than IRC chat. It will turn out during our sessions, if this is going to be utilized a lot. Thank you to Colas Nahaboo for the tip. Here is the etherpad-document.
It is unsure if the web connection in hannover and our technical equipment will make it possible to offer a video stream. But if so we will. Find out on the IRC chat what the current state is. Not established until now. Lets see …
We are looking forward to virtually meet you for our first Foswiki Community Summit.
Martin Seibert on behalf of the physical participants in Hannover
Participants of the last TWiki summit
Did you know, that Foswiki is now an officially registered association with bylaws and all that is needed, to prevent that community from being influence by commercial interests? Yay! Thank you once more to Jens Hanssen and a lot of others to make this possible. we want to have our very first general assembly and use it also for our first Foswiki Summit.
The event takes place on the 21st and 22nd of November 2009 in Hannover, Germany. We will meet at Krokus (Stadtteilzentrum Kronsberg), Thie 6, 30539 Hannover (see on Google Maps for more details). There are already 16 community members registered for the event. Almost all of us gather for an informal Get-Together already on Friday at 8 pm at the restaurant Cheers, Marschnerstrasse 2, Hannover (Map, public transportation: Station “Christuskirche”, Line 6).
We would love to see you there also. The event is free to attend and you do not have to become a Foswiki Association member, if you participate. Everybody is welcome.
Register for the event by simply adding your name in our summit wiki page!
Gathering with the Foswiki community is a lot of fun
This week, Foswiki has turned One!
Foswiki was started as a fork on the 27 October 2008. A year later and the Foswiki project is still going strong. We have now had well over 5,000 commits to our Subversion repository from nearly 60 active developers.
That’s not all, as of today there are 217 quality Extensions available to download that modify and enhance Foswiki, interface with other systems, and much more.
There is still much more to come from Foswiki, with some great work going into the 1.1 release and yet more upcoming extensions. This is only the beginning, and with the help of the community Foswiki will continue to be a success for many years to come.
Why not help us celebrate our birthday by joining us at our first Foswiki Summit next month? Its a great opportunity to shape the future of Foswiki. If you can’t be there in person there will also be opportunities to join in virtually.
Congratulations to Foswiki and the hard work of the community over the last year.
TWiki.net is successful and has compelling language in its marketing materials. The organization jazzed up its website, has participated in several wiki competitions, and are mentioned in blog posts on wikis. For the uniniated, TWiki.org and TWiki.net are controlled by the same organization. While TWiki.org is the “open source” face of TWiki.net, TWiki.net is siginificantly a marketing arm of TWiki.net, funneling sales leads from the former to the latter.
I am writing this article not as a rant against TWiki, but in the interest of all those who consider TWiki as their enterprise wiki and want to compare it with Foswiki. As this is the official Foswiki weblog, there will be a bias for Foswiki. Nevertheless, I have tried an even-handed approach to the material below, attempting to keep any “spin” to a minimum. Here are my theses that I will lay out in detail later:
- Twiki.net is good at marketing. But their marketing won’t buy you the love for the product from your employees. It converts into nothing you need in your company.
- But TWiki has modest product development underway and little active community. But these attributes are what you need as a customer. You need a slick product. You need developers who enhance your solution with plugins and innovate. And a product needs an active and living community to foster its development.
- Foswiki has a strong product development and a strong community. That is important for you as a customer. In TWiki there is no strong community left.
Video Trailer for this blog post:
I will now address the areas “Community”, “Product development” and “Marketing” in more detail:
Although it might not evident at first sight, the people behind a product are most important for the success of the product in the long run. There is no product development and no innovation without a community.
The leftovers at TWiki.net are Peter Thoeny and his employees. There is little community activity to be seen, unfortunately. It would also be cool for TWiki.net to have an active community instead of what we see now. If Twiki does not change the lack of community soon, it will simply die from inactivity in product development eventually. If you look at the download page of the open source product TWiki you will see 13 links to the “commercial owner” TWiki.net. Before you can download you are requested to fill out a form. And the form contents go to where? To TWiki.net. 
This is not the environment for professional consultants. This is a way to ensure no professional community evolves.
13 links to the commercial entity TWiki.net dry out community-activity.
The TWiki Download-Area is also only a marketing data collection activity for TWiki.net. Is that open source?
The people who developed TWiki during the last 10 years have moved to Foswiki. These people have founded a democratic and fully-independent Foswiki association Foswiki community members report the wiki development is now fun again. And that’s what makes projects like Foswiki thrive. A good, active, and living community is the basis of every successful open source project.
TWiki.net seems to have concentrated on marketing and left the development up to Foswiki. TWiki.net can incorporate Foswiki code in their software quite easily as both applications share the same code base. All that might be new and probably developed by Peter Thoeny is proprietory and for sale. I have my doubts that this practice of depriving the community of new features is compliant with the GPL. That might also be simple ignorance. But all these exclusive “features” cannot be seen and assessed. To date, I have not seen a video or a screenshot or a thorough description of these “exclusive” features. You should be very cautious if things are only promised but not shown.
Back to community development. To my knowledge, there is not a single feature in TWiki that would not have been available in Foswiki before. And I am watching TWiki pretty closely.
Within 11 months since the TWiki fork Foswiki was created, we saw more than 5000 code checkins from developers. A lot of new plugins have been made available to extend your user experience. I want to point to three of them:
These are just three of numerous examples that they really rock in my opinion.
Foswiki has fixed 400 bugs that are still unresolved in TWiki. Did you know that?
Foswiki is an open source wiki that rocks. If I am asked what to choose if you are searching for a true open source wiki, I highly recommend Foswiki as an open source enterprise wiki.
Disclaimer: This blog post only reflects the view of Martin Seibert as an individual. It is not an official statement of the Foswiki community and it might not represent all opinions. Additionally, as I have been kicked out of the TWiki-community like all other members last year, I might have missed certain details. I am happy for you to add them through the commenting feature below.
