Yesterday, 2008-10-27: 21:00 GMT, just a minute before the regular TWiki release meeting, the company TWIKI.NET announced unilaterally that the best for the TWiki.org project would be for them to take over governance. With it comes a complete lock down of the community site. From that minute on, all long-time contributors have lost access to their code. Counter-reaction: the community has left the building, leaving TWIKI.NET without a contributing community. Question: is it a sensible move for a venture capital firm that depends on a healthy Open Source community to lock it out?

Tags: community, fork, opensource, twiki

Get a decent T(wiki)-Shirt in the TrickyWikiShop. Have your favorite slogan on the back when you meet the TWikiCommunity on the upcoming TWiki Community Summit in Berlin on 4th and 5th September.

Tags: merchandise, twiki

A new plugin uses the Safe module in Perl to constrain perl scripts in TWiki topics so they are safe to execute on your server.

Tags: perl, plugin, security, twiki

How to convert Jot Spot data to TWiki

Tags: conversion, google, jotspot, twiki

A Long, Long Time Ago Rafael Alvarez contributed a REST architecture for TWiki that until relatively recently had been largely ignored. That's a shame, because TWiki has fallen behind the curve on effective interaction, partly because it is so difficult and inefficient to interact with TWiki from Javascript. More recently we have been able to re-architect big sections of the core to make REST more useful. Writing a REST script still isn't all that easy, however. This post is intended to try and make it easier.

Tags: ajax, javascript, json, rest, twiki, wysiwyg, xmlrpc

Getting the values of TWiki variables into Javascript can be a trial. This article describes one simple technique for doing that.

STC Spring Event highlights issues of Technical Communicators, and reveals an interesting new way of assessing "Web-2-ness"

Tags: collaboration, user, web2, wiki

The current TWiki::Cache implementation has been proposed for integration to the next TWiki release (code name freetown).

Tags: caching, performance, twiki

Dinky little quiz plugin adds value to TWiki-based training

Tags: collaboration, plugin, twiki, wikiapps

I was talking to James Matheson of Saikore a few months ago, and we thought it was about time that there was a 'Wiki-Wednesday' in Sydney, Australia. James has organised it while I was in Zurich.

Tags: meetup, saikore, sydney, tuesday, wiki

WikiGardens.com is a new TWiki-based web site aimed at plant lovers. Developed with technical services provided by WikiRing, the site features a host of features designed to allow both professional and home gardeners to share information about plants, gardening, and all related matters.

Tags: gardening, twiki, wiki, wikiapps

It's a common scenario; a manager unplugs their laptop and goes travelling for a week. During their time away they want to work in the team wiki, but often don't have a suitable connection. It would be good if there was a way to let them roam, and re-synch their changes when they have a good connection again.

Tags: ajax, database, repository, twiki

Sven Dowideit takes a closer look at a couple of existing TWiki skins and how they work.

Sadly, they are not much help for new skin developers and web designers, as they set no real consistency that can be built on. To try to resolve this, I have altered the default skin to offer better reusablility – initially as a base for the new TWiki CssZengardenSkin.

Tags: css, skin, twiki, zengarden

Today most sites use content engines that produce highly dynamic content, by assembling different objects to finally generate html and send over to your browser. This makes caching on the server side a must. As wikis emerge from simple one-page services and leap into the regions of content management systems, caching is increasingly attractive here too. Last, but not least, there are many more lurkers and page hoppers than contributors to a wiki, and there's no need to recompute the same pages again and again.

Tags: caching, content, performance, twiki

Recent work on content repositories

Tags: database, repository

The relationship between Perl and CPAN