David Ornstein's Blog: Wiki

New official release of FlexWiki (build 1677)

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 19:48:09 GMT

Craig just updated SourceForge to make build 1677 the "official" release. It is in every way identical with interim build 1677. We (the core developers) talked about it, and realized that while we still want to get to a 2.0-type release, it was going slower than we'd like, and in the meantime the answer to too many questions was "Upgrade to the latest build". We figured if we had that much confidence in the latest build, it should be the one we recommend for new installations.

Here are the release notes:

This release contains many, many new features and bugfixes. Here is a partial listing. See the change notes for a complete history. Thanks to the many contributors who wrote all these goodies in their spare time.

Added support for colored text via the %color% tag.
A completely rearchitected storage engine that allows for pluggable stores.
An implementation of the pluggable storage engine that allows a namespace to be stored in SQL Server.
RSS feed format improvements.
A new URL scheme. Topics can now be accessed using URLs like

http://www.flexwiki.com/default.aspx/Namespace/TopicName

Fixed newsletter functionality.

Improved anti-spam technology, like nofollow support and URL blacklisting.

Improved testing - the automated build installs FlexWiki and verifies correct behavior via a browser.

Support for page and page fragment templates.

Many WikiTalk improvements, including improvements to forms-building support.

Improved support for Windows 2000 installation.

Support for setting page title using page's Title property.

Better support for Firefox.

Support for "breadcrumb" functionality to display user's most-recently-visited pages in a sidebar.

Getting Things Done (Flex)Wiki

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 18:33:55 GMT

Jeff Sandquist (a bud here at Microsoft) has launched a Wiki (using FlexWiki) on Getting Things Done. This is my favorite time management methodology and my favorite Wiki software. :-)

FlexWiki supports NoFollow NoSpam

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 16:30:27 GMT

As of yesterday, FlexWiki supports the new NoFollow initiative. This should help reduce LinkSpam on flexwiki.com and other FlexWiki sites on the Internet.

And to help spammers know that the site uses this technique (so they actually realize they're wasting their time spamming the site), I've created the new NoFollowNoSpam logo -- grab it and use it if you'd like.

Wiki spam and nofollow

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 05:15:55 GMT

OK. Well, maybe there's some hope.

Spam on wiki's is quite annoying. It's been a problem recently on www.flexwiki.com. And it's been a huge problem on blogs. In FlexWiki, we've been building out infrastructure to prevent spammers ("link spammers" who want to raise their page rank in search engines). We've made lots of progress and have a few more tricks up our sleeves.

But today Google announced that they (and a pile of other folks including Yahoo and MSN) are going to support a new attribute on HTML links that tells their search engines to ignore links marked with the attribute.

Obviously this is a good thing and I'm going to get support for this built into FlexWiki in the next few days. But real success will only come with a strong and broad education campaign to make sure spammers realize they're wasting their time. That's why it's good to see folks like Google and MSN on board with this.

Major checkin for FlexWiki

Sun, 26 Dec 2004 05:50:17 GMT

I made a major checkin to FlexWiki yesterday.

Unfortunately, something (software-related) seems to have gone wrong with the build machine at about the same time. I *think* it was indirectly caused by the checkin, but we’re not sure yet. This caused old builds to get wiped and caused our very dedicated buildmaster to spend several painful (and appreciated!) hours getting the build system going again. (Everybody please send good vibes to Craig!)…

This checkin represents a couple of months of work and some pretty major architectural changes inside FlexWiki. (And I’d like to thank Naveen Yajaman for all of his help and design work during this process!)

Over the next day or two I’ll write up a more comprehensive description of these changes on www.flexwiki.com, but the short summary is below.

Now that this checkin is in, I will also be rolling in the collection of submissions for which I’d promised to do the integration (sorry for the delay, but the code base was undergoing too much churn to get them in earlier). I also plan to spend as much time as I can (when I’m not enjoying my vacation with my fabulous family) working on the nastiest bugs and most desirable enhancement requests queued up on SourceForge.

Summary of changes:

· New caching architecture that doesn’t rely on file-system change notifications. This increases performance and also decouples the caching system from the assumption that all FlexWiki content is stored in the file-system. This was a necessary precursor for the next change.

· Make the FlexWiki storage system pluggable. In particular, generalize the architecture so that file-system-based storage for namespaces is only one of the ways to store FlexWiki content. Read-write namespaces are now implemented in a subclass of a new abstract base class, laying the groundwork for new storage systems (including SQL database, web-service-based, etc. See AbstractContentBase for a discussion of this idea and the original motivations.)

o The refactoring here also allows for ReadOnlyNamespaces. A ReadOnlyNamespace is one whose content is not generated by a user, but by a program. And it’s read-only. This allows namespace “providers” to produce namespaces that are filled with content in the Wiki framework that can be includes in a larger FlexWiki federation. There are a lot of cool ideas lurking here (e.g., a namespace with the weather, each city is a topic; a namespace that provides automatic documentation of .NET classes based on reflection, each class and member as topics, etc…)

· Substantial improvements to the administration tools (at <site>/admin/default/aspx). A nicely-revamped configuration validator, cache viewer, etc.

Much of this might seem a little boring and invisible to end-users and non-developer users of FlexWiki, but the underlying impacts on the system and the impact for developers will be substantial. This work has really been laying the foundation for what I hope will be some excellent innovation in FlexWiki.

Note that in the current build that the web service is currently inoperable. Clearly this needs to be fixed before we release this build on SourceForge.

Please do try out the new build (it’ll offer an automatic upgrade of your current configuration) and report any problems back to the FlexWiki users mailing list. Do take care and make a backup of your installation before you install the new one – I *think* I got everything right, but it’s a lot of change here.

FlexWiki plugin for bliki (blog+wiki)

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 15:02:41 GMT

Derek's doing some cool stuff with a FlexWiki plugin for Bliki. Nice use of FlexWiki's extensibility and a very nice fusion between blogs and Wiki.

Talking about Forbes.com: Extreme Blogging

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 04:57:47 GMT

Quote

Forbes.com: Extreme Blogging

Those wiki companies that hope to forge their way into the corporate market will need to offer heavy-duty databases, the ability to perform meta-text operations and real-time collaboration. Because free alternatives are out there, for-profit wiki-makers will have to develop software that is simple but customizable and, perhaps most importantly, they'll probably need to partner with an established player. Already Microsoft, Google and IBM are closely watching wiki development. In fact, in December 2003, Microsoft hired Ward Cunningham, the programmer who originally invented wikis, as a software architect. . Microsoft uses several wikis internally, based on a wiki engine, FlexWiki.

Talking about Digital Web Magazine - News - KM and Intranets

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 05:50:08 GMT

Quote

Digital Web Magazine - News - KM and Intranets
I mentioned this in my post, FlexWiki. We are running on the Windows sever platform so this was idea.. it's ease of use and natrual integration with Windows was ideal. None of the other Wiki platforms we looked at that stated they run on Windows worked well. I mean, its like they were designed for Unix but also happened to run on Windows if you did a lot of hacking.

Yup... I have no shame. I wrote much of FlexWiki to work well on Windows. It's what I use all day long. It's what I use at work. It's what most (but not all) people use every day...

FlexWiki 1.8.1613.0 released

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 05:32:56 GMT

Quote https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=6055842&forum_id=42341

FlexWiki 1.8.1613.0 has been released and is available for immediate download.

This release contains several major enhancements to FlexWiki, the most significant of which (IMO) is improved FireFox compatibility. Other important enhancements include the addition of a "Cancel" button to the edit page, a history list to show the most recently visited topics, improved support for non-ASCII characters, and WikiTalk enhancements.

Thanks to everyone that contributed to this release!