Foswiki 2.0 Release Candidate is available

Hello Foswiki Community,

We are very pleased to announce that Foswiki Release 2.0 RC2 is ready for testing.

Foswiki 1.2 is now Foswiki 2.0!

The project team has addressed a long-standing issue that has been deferred repeatedly from before Foswiki’s inception. The Foswiki core has been converted to UNICODE / utf-8 encoding. This change is significant and migration of the Foswiki data store to utf-8 is highly recommended. 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 2.0.

A number of other issues identified during Beta 1 were also addressed. You can see the complete release notes at http://foswiki.org/System/ReleaseNotes02x00. Unless new significant issues are reported, we expect that Foswiki 2.0 will be released on 4 July 2015. The download links for RC 2 can be found on http://foswiki.org/Download/FoswikiRelease02x00x00RC2. 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

• 312 bug fixes, and 157 enhancements relative to 1.1.9
• Incorporates 48 “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 RC 2:

• Czech, Danish, French, German and Italian are >99% complete.
• Traditional Chinese is >93% 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 2.0