Foswiki 1.2.0 Beta 2 Ready for Testing

Hello Foswiki Community,

We are very pleased to announce that after a 2-month "sprint" by a team of dedicated developers and translators. Foswiki Release 1.2.0 Beta 2 is ready for testing. The work on Beta 2 tackled a very long-standing issue that has been deferred repeatedly from before Foswiki's inception. The Foswiki core has been converted to unicode / ut-8 encoding. This has some immediate and very significant benefits:

• Many deferred tasks related to corrupted characters have been resolved.
• Sites that chose to convert to utf-8 encoding in the stored topics have full access to the unicode character set in topic contents and names.
• Internationalization "just works".

Although Foswiki now works best with utf-8 encoded topics, you can still chose to use traditional encodings, such as iso-8859-1. Encoding/decoding is now done "at the edge" in the Foswiki store when topics are read and written. Extensions that use the Foswiki APIs should not require changes. Extensions that work with the external world will require some changes to be compatible with Foswiki 1.2.

A number of other issues identified during Beta 1 were also addressed. You can see the complete release notes at  http://foswiki.org/System/ReleaseNotes01x02. Overall 480+ checkins were made after the Beta 1 release.

Unless new major issues are reported, we expect that the next build will the release candidate. We are targeting building 1.2.0-RC1 on June 29th, and if all goes well, 1.2.0 will be released on 4 July 2015.

The download links for Beta 2 can be found on  http://foswiki.org/Download/FoswikiRelease01x02x00Beta2.

Be sure to carefully review the release notes and installation instructions. A lot of significant changes have been made, including a very different installation process.

If you encounter issues, please report new issues at  http://foswiki.org/Tasks, and you can contact the developers for support on http://irclogs.foswiki.org/, or on foswiki-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net.

And as mentioned below, we need help in translation of Foswiki. If you or your colleagues can help, please contact  foswiki-translations@lists.sourceforge.net.

Highlights of this release

• 257 bug fixes, and 129 enhancements relative to 1.1.9, and 51 bugfixes since Beta 1
• Incorporates 49 "Feature proposals"
• After in-depth security review, improvements made in 15 areas.

For users

• New "Natural Edit" TML editor helps users learn the Topic Markup Language
• New "block indent" TML markup ( Multiple of 3 spaces, :(colon) (space) indented text )
• HomePagePlugin adds individualized homepage on login.
• More realistic edit "preview" includes active links.
• SubscribePlugin allows one-click subscribe for topic change notifications
• Old EditTablePlugin has been replaced by the EditRowPlugin. This plugin provides enhanced capabilities and client-side sorting of tables.
• Improved support for international character sets.
• Updated jQuery, with more use of AJAX for crisper performance.

For administrators

• New pluggable Store backend, and Plain File store available: higher performing and eliminates use of RCS.
• New pluggable ACL processing with Read only and Admin only access settings
• Simpler initial installation and bootstrap of settings.
• /internal admin/ login can be eliminated, avoiding use of shared passwords.
• New configure interface requires JavaScript
• New command-line configuration tool available
• UpdatesPlugin alerts admin when updated extensions are available.
• FastCGI and mod_perl supported "out of the box".
• Simpler web server configuration: No need to apply special protection to configure script.

Translation status: Help Wanted!

As of Beta 2:

• Czech, Danish, French, German and Italian are >99% complete.
• Dutch, Norwegian, and Portuguese (Brazil) are 70-88% complete.
• Other languages are 60% complete or lower.
• A new translation has been added: Klingon, 94% translated.

We especially need help with Bulgarian, Finnish, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and Ukrainian. For more details on translation status, meet the Foswiki Community and the  TranslationTeam. Translations are done on the Foswiki's Weblate translation server. Foswiki thanks the Translators for their Herculean efforts. If you are interesting in helping with the translation, please subscribe to the  foswiki-translations@lists.sourceforge.net mailing list.

Happy testing!

George Clark Release Manager, Foswiki 1.2.0