Official Foswiki Weblog

Foswiki 1.1.0 is out in the wild. This one was a rather long development cycle with a lot of work going on in various places. One of the most significant changes is Foswiki’s adoption of jQuery as its primary JavaScript framework. As a consequence we redesigned the way static files like css and js are added to a page which results in a much improved load performance of pages. So while we’ve added a wide range of new functionality to Foswiki that comes with jQuery, we also streamlined the way pages are loaded to make this feasible. Thank goes to all of the third party jQuery modules that made it into the Foswiki core for writing such great Open Source software.

We’ve got more in this release. Let me pick another two. See the full release notes below.

There’s a new macro called QUERY which leverages the query syntax known from good old SEARCH to query meta data of a topic. Think of it as FORMFIELD on steroids: while FORMFIELD was only able to retrieve a single value of a DataForm, QUERY can now return a wide range of properties bringing them in to an SQL -like query language. In other words: lots of power for your wiki applications.

The other big addition is a page cache. Foswiki can now cache pages being rendered and deliver them the next time they are requested from cache instead of computing them again. Caching pages within Foswiki itself has got the big advantage of allowing to track dependencies among the ingredients needed to render a single page from within the engine itself. This kind of deep dependency tracking mechanism takes care that wiki pages are recomputed as needed in a transparent way. Caching full wiki pages can dramatically improve performance of a single page as well as overall throughput of the site while requiring less cpu to cope with certain kinds of trafic. The implementation has already been used successfully in a couple of high end public sites running a backport of the page cache to previous Foswiki releases.

Well, folks, try yourself. We have got plans for the next 2.0 release already but are also anticipating further 1.x maintenance releases on the way.

Here’s the full release notes by Kenneth. Have fun.

Yours,
Michael Daum.

—

Release of Foswiki version 1.1.0 – 04 Oct 2010

On behalf of the entire Foswiki community I can proudly announce that
the release of the Foswiki release 1.1.0  is available for download at

Foswiki web site: http://foswiki.org/Download/FoswikiRelease01×01x00

It is a release with more than 270 bug fixes relative to 1.0.10 and more
than 680 bug fixes relative to 1.0.0. And the release adds more than 100
enhancements. Foswiki 1.1.0 introduces jQuery Javascript user interface
framework, improved topic history display, new QUERY and FORMAT macros,
better user interface for group management, much improved WYSIWYG
editor, facelift of the default skin, much improved configure tool, and
many more enhancements.

Foswiki 1.1 has many improvements that end-users as well as
administrators will appreciate. In addition Foswiki 1.1 comes with a lot
of “under the hood” improvements to the core code, with the goal of
making it easier to plug in work from other projects, such as jQuery,
KinoSearch, Solr and others. Work has been made to improve the
definition of internal APIs to allow other not-yet-written modules, such
as store implementations. Most of these modifications should be
invisible to the end user and admin, but are important to position
Foswiki for the next generation of plugins.

What’s new – highlights:

• Adoption of the jQuery Javascript user interface framework
• New macros enabled by jQuery
• Powerful new QUERY macro
• SEARCH now has a zeroresults format string and search results pagination
• New FORMAT macro
• WikiGroups have add & remove user interface
• TinyMCEPlugin updates include much better user interface, rowspan support, and autosave feature
• Testing configuration variables in %IF
• “Copy topic” now copies attachments
• Tailoring of user registration made easier
• Easy tailoring of reset/change password and change email forms
• TMPL:DEFs may now access previous (overridden) TMPL:DEF using the new %TMPL:PREV% template token
• Logging of access failures
• configure user interface revamped
• Configure file system checks added
• Newer modern Icon set for Document Graphics
• Table Plugin has been improved
• SlideShowPlugin can now use CSS based templates
• HistoryPlugin and CompareRevisionsAddOn are now included with the default plugin set giving much nicer history/changes features
• AutoViewTemplatePlugin is now included with the default plugin set
• ZonePlugin feature set has been merged to the core Foswiki code
• New page cache feature
• Several API Enhancements for extension writers

Bugs can be reported on http://foswiki.org/Tasks/CreateNewTask

On behalf of the Foswiki Association and the entire Foswiki Community:
Enjoy the Foswiki 1.1.0

Kenneth Lavrsen
Release manager

Michael Daum Release Development, features, performance, Release

Cebit 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.

Michael Daum Promo cebit, conference, perl