Tonight I have released the new and improved Kino Search extensions for Foswiki.
Kino Search is a Perl port of the Lucene indexed based search engine from Apache. It provides a very fast full text search across large amounts of data, plus the ability to use Google style operators.
The Foswiki implementation is made up of the KinoSearchContrib and the KinoSearchPlugin. Not only does this provide indexed search for topics, it also has the ability to index a number of attachments, including MS Office 2003 and 2007 documents and PDF’s.
The KinoSearchContrib is the workhorse, providing the indexer and a script for the searching. The KinoSearchPlugin is a thin wrapper around it that hooks into Foswiki to provide a %KINOSEARCH% macro and support for indexing on immediately when a topic has been saved.
There are a number of improvements over the previous version of Kino Search for Foswiki, including:
Fast CGI and mod_perl support
Indexing MS Office 2007 files
Much more resilient indexing
In particular when indexing password protected files or when an incorrect file type is supplied (such as attaching a image and calling it myfile.txt)
Using more of the official Foswiki API
Improved documentation and templates
If your Foswiki install has grown to a size where the performance of the default search is starting to suffer then you will need this extension. Of course smaller wikis will also benefit from the attachment search.
The Foswiki community loves Kenneth Larvsen for releasing the next Foswiki version 1.0.7 last Monday with the following email:
Release of Foswiki version 1.0.7, 20 Sep 2009
On behalf of the entire Foswiki community I can proudly announce the
release of the Foswiki patch release 1.0.7
Foswiki 1.0.7 is available for download at the following locations
* Foswiki web site: http://foswiki.org/Download
Since the January release of 1.0.0 more than 190 additional bugs have
been fixed.
Foswiki 1.0.7 was built 20 Sep 2009. It is a patch release with more
than 190 bug fixes relative to 1.0.0 and some enhancements. This release
fixes some serious issues introduced by the CSRF fix and the redirect
cache fix in 1.0.6. Major enhancement that also fixes many annoying
editor bugs is the upgrade of the !Tiny MCE editor to version 3.2.2.
It is highly recommended to upgrade your Foswiki to 1.0.7.
Installers for Windows and Mac are already available on the download page just as other downloads.
Important Changes since Foswiki 1.0.6
The Wysiwyg editor has been upgraded to using Tiny MCE editor version 3.2.2 which solves many editor related bugs. The pickaxe icon has been replaced by a “Wiki Text” button as the pickaxe was hard to guess the function of. And the editor now has a full screen editing feature. This is the biggest and most important change in that release, that you will find in Foswiki 1.0.7. A big thank you goes to Crawford Currie for making this possible.
Several bugs fixed related to the Cross-Site Request Forgery feature.
Cross-Site Request Forgery feature has been enhanced to also protect against unwanted attachment of files
Foswiki has been full of activity after the fork and we are happy to see, that former TWiki-contributors have almost completely moved to Foswiki and more and more new developers have started to join the young Foswiki-project.
We will run a series of blog posts, that will show you new plugins and features, that do not and will most likely never exist in TWiki, that are already available in the Foswiki-core-repository.
To prevent a dependency to single individuals in the future, the forkers have started to work on a Foswiki-association ever since the fork was created. Namely Jens Hansen and André Ulrich pushed the project of founding a Foswiki-association with their TaskTeam.
The result will be an official entity, that has professional bylaws and will be led by true and fair democratic principles, that will guarantee an independent, strong and transparent community leadership. At the moment the Foswiki association is pending in the registration process. That will last for about 4 weeks. These are the official bylaws of the Foswiki-community, which are available in English and German language:
“On Wednesday the 09.09.2009 we came together for the initial Founding of the Foswiki Association. After four hours of meeting it was created – articles explained and agreed, iInitial board elected as well as signatures approved with the notary. Afterwards we took a beer and had some nice chats. I guess we will manage to upload some pictures during the weekend.
Oh by the way…
Congratulations and thanks for the effort. Some of you did a lot of traveling to make this possible.”
Foswiki is now one out of few if not the only free-and-open-source-wiki for enterprises that has an official association, to back it. We hope that this will increase the trust in our project and will protect us from shortcomings, that we suffered from as the “real” TWiki-community.
Foswiki is now also available over a FreeBSD port. See the following mail vom Greg Larkin:
I just committed the initial version of the FreeBSD port for Foswiki
1.0.6: http://www.freshports.org/www/foswiki/
This port enables you to install Foswiki on FreeBSD with the simple
command:
cd /usr/ports/www/foswiki && make install clean
I’m still working on some scaffolding in the port to support
auto-generated Foswiki plugin ports. Once that’s done, I’ll add a port
for each plugin found in http://svn.foswiki.org/trunk/.
If anyone has feedback, bug reports or patches, please send them along!
If you want to make Foswiki adapt better to your needs help us to improve this open source software.