Foswiki 2.0 is available!

Hello Foswiki Community,

We are very pleased to announce that Foswiki 2.0 is available for download. Nearly 7 years ago, November 19th, 2008, the Foswiki name was announced. Since then, the project has made approximately 20 releases of Foswiki. This release builds upon the collective effort of many developers and sponsors across the 7 year project history. Foswiki 2.0 was built on 4 July 2015. 1 year, 6 months, 2 weeks since 1.1.9 was released.

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.
• Independence from ASCII! – 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.

You can see the complete release notes at http://foswiki.org/System/ReleaseNotes02x00. The download links can be found on http://foswiki.org/Download/FoswikiRelease02x00x00. 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.

Highlights of this release

• 512 bug fixes and enhancements
• Implemented 59 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 )
• New %SET macro for better control of preference settings in wiki applications
• 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.
• Greatly 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 requirement for 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.
• Rewritten Page Cache for better performance, and is now recommended.
• Compatibility with the latest Perl versions. Tested on versions from 5.8.8 through 5.22.0 (5.18+ strongly recommended)

Translation status:

• 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.

The project has adopted a “Continuous Translation” model. Translations are done on the Foswiki’s Weblate translation server and we welcome anyone to contribute at any time. Translations done now will be picked up in the next Foswiki patch release. The project 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.

On behalf of the entire Foswiki project community, special thanks to everyone who made this new release possible.

George Clark
Release Manager, Foswiki 2.0