FORMATLIST is Foswiki's Swiss army knife for manipulating text. It has many parameters and using it can be sometimes perplexing. I hope you find my notes useful.

Simplifying a Foswiki installation is a large ask. Multiple operating systems, extensions, Perl dependancies, libraries, web servers etc. How can we make it repeatable and easy to do. First step find a Linux distribution that provides ALL the required perl modules.

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.

Foswiki summit begins today and lasts until tomorrow. Did you know that you can participate from your home computer remotely? Yes, you can.

One goal of the Foswiki community is to be open and transparent. That's why we try to incorporate all technical means available to help you join the summit from your remote desktop.

Here is what you can do:

Join our IRC chat

That is where we expect the most activity and documentation, because this is the channel we use most often in the day-to-day community communication. Here is how you can get on our IRC channel.

Read the wikipages on www.foswiki.org

We will try to document and update the wiki regularly. You can monitor these changes by looking at all changes in all webs.

Ride the wave

Some of the summit's participants are fond of Google Wave and will try to use it for our conference live documentation in addition to other channels. Find all public Google Waves about Foswiki here.

Etherpad for live text collaboration

The service etherpad.com offers live text collaboration that is much faster than Google Wave and more powerful than IRC chat. It will turn out during our sessions, if this is going to be utilized a lot. Thank you to Colas Nahaboo for the tip. Here is the etherpad-document.

uStream live video

It is unsure if the web connection in hannover and our technical equipment will make it possible to offer a video stream. But if so we will. Find out on the IRC chat what the current state is. Not established until now. Lets see …

We are looking forward to virtually meet you for our first Foswiki Community Summit.

Martin Seibert on behalf of the physical participants in Hannover