Official Foswiki Weblog

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

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

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.

Here is, how you can help.

mseibert Development community, Development, foswiki, FreeBSD, FreeBSD port, glarkin, greg, larkin, port

With Pootle we now have a user-friendly web portal that makes our translation process much simpler. It allows online translation, work assignment, gives statistics and allows easy volunteer contribution. A flexible workflow supports translation on an individual basis, cooperativ in teams or even by starting a powerful translation marathon.

We like to say thanks to the Pootle community for developing this tool and for the very friendly and helpful support. Special thanks goes to Friedel who helped on #pootle IRC to get the tool running.

You can access the translation framework on translate.foswiki.org.

As we want to make the translation process as open as possible, everyone can make suggestions for translations without even to log in.

To assure high quality and consistent wording every language has a coordinator, who can approve translations and push them into the Foswiki SVN repository. On the Translation-Team topic you will find a list of all coordinators and translators supporting the effort.

Our community is growing every day and language support needs to speed up. It is our quality goal to offer Foswiki in as many languages as possible. This makes using Foswiki more convenient especially for beginners. The Translation framework is a big step to reach this aim. It is an invitation to everybody, to support the translation process and make Fowiki the best wiki ever created.

If you can’t wait to support the translation effort on Foswiki, please get in contact with our language coordinator André Ulrich.

aulrich Development foswiki, translation