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.
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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
This release of Foswiki comes with quite some new features and more than 160 crunched bugs relative to the previous release. Here are some highlights:
For a long time we’ve talked about stitching a relational database into Foswiki, mainly to speed up query searches. To keep things simple Foswiki uses a text database, which stores topics in lots of individual files. By default searches are implemented by searching every one of these files for matching text. This isn’t as bad as it sounds; searching is quite fast, but doesn’t scale up terribly well, so people have coupled in various full-text search engines, such as Kinosearch, to accelerate text searches. However there’s been very little successful work yet on speeding up query searches – which is a shame, because query searches are heavily used in most wiki applications. The problem has always been that it’s difficult to map from a Foswiki search query to any kind of structured search language, such as SQL.