Official Foswiki Weblog

On behalf of the entire Foswiki community I can proudly announce that the release of the Foswiki release 1.1.1  is available for download at

Foswiki web site: http://foswiki.org/Download/FoswikiRelease01×01x01

Foswiki 1.1.1 is a release that fixes some important bugs that were introduced in 1.1.0. It is highly recommended that all running 1.1.0 upgrade to 1.1.1.

The entire Foswiki community has been busy the past weeks with very quick responses to the bug reports on 1.1.0. There are always a few bugs in a new “.0″ release but the team has been very committed. The reporters have received quick patches so they could continue their upgrade. The end result is a 1.1.1 which is a very stable and high quality release.

Upgrade package is available for upgrading from 1.1.0 to 1.1.1. so upgrading is quick and easy.

Foswiki 1.1 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

It is a proud release manager that know that you will all enjoy the 1.1.1

Kenneth Lavrsen

klavrsen Release 1.1.x, Development, features, foswiki, Release

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

I just read a list of good arguments from Colas Nahaboo for Foswiki on the Foswiki mailing list and wanted to post them here quickly:

Our Foswiki at work (ILOG, then IBM) is in place since 2001, and has now 60,000 pages. In my view, the main strengths of Foswiki wrt mediawiki are:

• Utter reliability: it can run unattended for months without a worry, it relies only on the filesystem. And if the filesystem is on a NAS…. automatic continous backup for free!
• Resilience: it survived problems such as no more disk space, power outages, hard disk failures with no damage nor corruptions
• Integration: you can use Foswiki pages as front-end applications to services, or as display of programs results, as the engine just handle text files that are easy to handle or generate by any scripting language you like. For instance we use a separate search engine (now a Google appliance) to provide full text searching.
• Power: If you are used to the unix way of thinking (data is defined as simple text in files, and you use shell/perl/python/ruby/C/… scripts to manage them) then any kind of feature can be added to Foswiki as the engine is geared to having its data files changed by other processes too, thanks to its dynamic nature. The great feature of Foswiki is that users can code a feature via Foswiki Macros, and other users can copy/paste/enhance this code which is not hidden like the php of Mediawiki extensions.
• On the performance problems, the main drawback of this dynamicity is that a lot of things are recomputed on each requests, e.g. some ”macros” in Foswiki that search in pages can be slow. But things can be optimised quite a bit by separating the contents into different directories, and coding special scripts or plugins to optimize the bottlenecks. Flat files are not slow per se (a grep in our 60,000 pages takes 10 seconds), it is just that we lack now the equivalent of ”indexes” you have with a database. But the community is working on this.

I would add that whether you choose Mediawiki or Foswiki, your technical team is expected to invest some time to understand how the system works. I guess in the end the decisive factor is whether your people are more at ease with php+mysql or with traditional Unix scripting.

Colas

Read the whole mail-conversation including a happy ending here on our Nabble-documentation online.

mseibert Tips colasnahaboo, community, features, foswiki, help

The Foswiki community loves Kenneth Larvsen for releasing the next Foswiki version 1.0.7 last Monday with the following email:

Release of Foswiki version 1.0.7, 20 Sep 2009

On behalf of the entire Foswiki community I can proudly announce the
release of the Foswiki patch release 1.0.7

Foswiki 1.0.7 is available for download at the following locations

* Foswiki web site: http://foswiki.org/Download

Since the January release of 1.0.0 more than 190 additional bugs have
been fixed.

Foswiki 1.0.7 was built 20 Sep 2009. It is a patch release with more
than 190 bug fixes relative to 1.0.0 and some enhancements. This release
fixes some serious issues introduced by the CSRF fix and the redirect
cache fix in 1.0.6. Major enhancement that also fixes many annoying
editor bugs is the upgrade of the !Tiny MCE editor to version 3.2.2.

It is highly recommended to upgrade your Foswiki to 1.0.7.

You can read the full email here.

• Installers for Windows and Mac are already available on the download page just as other downloads.

Important Changes since Foswiki 1.0.6

• The Wysiwyg editor has been upgraded to using Tiny MCE editor version 3.2.2 which solves many editor related bugs. The pickaxe icon has been replaced by a “Wiki Text” button as the pickaxe was hard to guess the function of. And the editor now has a full screen editing feature. This is the biggest and most important change in that release, that you will find in Foswiki 1.0.7. A big thank you goes to Crawford Currie for making this possible.
• Several bugs fixed related to the Cross-Site Request Forgery feature.
• Cross-Site Request Forgery feature has been enhanced to also protect against unwanted attachment of files
• TablePlugin sorts numbers and dates better
• EditTablePlugin handles SpreadSheetPlugin in footer rows correctly
• Fixed a problem where Windows installations of Foswiki would create new users with non-working passwords
• “Managing webs” feature redesigned for better usability

mseibert Release community, crawford currie, Development, features, foswiki, kennethlavrsen, press release, Release, wysiwyg

Did you ever ask yourself how one can improve the WebIndex in Foswiki, that simply lists the entries of a Foswiki-Web in alphabetical order? Andrew R. Jones created a Best Practice Tip on Foswiki.org and in his weblog (Improving the Web Index in Foswiki using the Filter Plugin):

In a standard Foswiki setup there is a topic in every web called WebTopicList, which is linked to from the side bar as Index. By default it simply lists all the topics in one big list, as shown below (or view onfoswiki.org):

This certainly isn’t very elegant. Luckily by using Michael Daum’s Filter Plugin we can improve the index by giving it some structure and making it more like a directory, as shown below:

To do this we only need to make a small change to the WebTopicList in the System web. Since all the other webs simply import that page the changes will be immediately visible across the wiki with just the one change.

Edit the WebTopicList topic and replace this line:

%TOPICLIST{"   * [[%BASEWEB%.$name][$name]]"}%

With this:

%MAKEINDEX{"%TOPICLIST{"$name" separator=","}%" cols="3" header="$anchors" format="[[%BASEWEB%.$item][$item]]"}%

Thats it! You now get a much more friendly and useful index in all of your webs.

Note: This tip has also been made available on foswiki.org.

mseibert Tips ajones, andrew jones, best practice, Development, features, foswiki, help, navigation, overview, webindex