Official Foswiki Weblog

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

We’ve been having fun at the 2011 Foswiki Camp! As well as some great discussions (and surprisingly few arguments) we have turned our hands to some hardcore hacking. Here’s some of what we’ve been working on:

• A new skin that will provide a strong base for the default install, and a good platform to build more sophisticated skins on. We’re applying learnings from many different skin developments to create a modern, HTML5-ready, easy to extend, look and feel.
• An exciting new methodology for packaging wiki applications, including a “play pen” which allows end users to try out applications in their own safe environment on foswiki.org, before deciding whether to install or not.
• Simplified and refined installation documentation for the core.
• First steps in replacing the Foswiki::Engine and low level CGI code, with the modern web ‘Plack’ framework (the Perl equivalent of Ruby’s excellent ‘Rack’).
• A clever new plugin that will notify foswiki admins when extension updates become available, that affect their own installations, saving them from missing out on important releases.
• A nice mind-map

What we haven’t started yet, but hope to get to tomorrow:

• Help people to share their own wiki applications on foswiki.org, in an easily accessible way.
• Ease the handling of attachments, supporting multi-upload using drag and drop, pagination through large lists, and download of zip archives of multiple attachments.
• Attack the “unicode” branch with interactive testing, to see how big the hole is.

Other messages that have come from the last couple of days include:

• We want to make Foswiki something that our users never grow out of, and that means keeping up with the technology curve. Store2, unicode, and Plack are all exciting advances that help us enormously.
• Continuity – ensuring safety of data and applications – always has been, and always will be, incredibly important to us.
• We really need to have more of these camps! The ideas exchanged, and the work done, have been incredible. The more the merrier!

Crawford Currie Development