I built and uploaded foswiki 1.0.8 installer for windows last night – hope you like it, cos i’ll be on holidays for a few days

For the last 2 weeks I’ve been working on an SAP connector for foswiki – I can display most SAP Tables, and call most SAP functions – all via ‘RFC’ – right now we’re working towards a proactive system healthcheck report, but it pretty much will allow us to build any SAP process right into foswiki. Cool huh.

and for fun I’ve been working on making a replacement DocumentGraphics icon set based on FamFamFamContrib for foswiki – the 10 year old hand drawn one really is dated.

Our project fork hit the one year milestone a week or so ago, and Arthur noticed this amazing ‘factoid’ on ohloh..

Very large, active development team

Over the past twelve months, 36 developers contributed new code to Foswiki.

This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh.

For this measurement, Ohloh considered only recent changes to the code. Over the entire history of the project, 43 developers have contributed.

All I can say, is WOW and thank you, to everyone that has worked on our project, and to all who discover it.

The Foswiki Association & Summit is happening in Hannover at the end of this month – I wish I could be there, but its a long way from Australia – maybe next year

This iteration I’ve been working using the HTTPDUserAdminContrib – as having the users and groups in the database makes it hard to work on.

Hopefully there’ll be time to use and extend it for foswiki 1.1

I’ve updated the USB Foswiki to include foswiki 1.0.7, and updated the systray controller to be a little more slick

I’m still looking for feedback from users – Its a nice fast way to try out foswiki without needing to install anything – just unzip the archive into the root of a disk, and click start_foswiki.bat (on Windows XP the autorun should start that automatically for you)

Continuing our commitment to bug fixing and solving difficult security issues, we’re proud to announce that the Foswiki project has released 1.0.7.

This release contains:

• an upgraded Wysiwyg editor : TinyMCE 3.2.2
• table plugin sorting improvements
• CSRF fixes and streamlineing
• and a series of Windows related improvements

see http://foswiki.org/Download/WebHome for more details, and to download the update.

I’m updating the Foswiki On a USB Stick at the moment, and will then work on Windows and Debian.

Ohloh shows a very comforting graph for me – over the year, we’ve been maintaining our momentum, and regularly have over 10 different contributors _every_ month.

I was asked on Friday night if I could make a demo foswiki USB system, and given that its high time we did one, I started to look into it. Initially I thought this would be a great oportunity to try out the HTTPEngine work Gilmar has been doing, but we’re not quite there yet. And so, I started a quick perusal of the existing WebServer on a Stick systems. Ideally, I want to use Strawberry perl, apache, and have the server and a browser start up automatically when the USB stick is inserted into the computer.

• MicroApache
• Server2Go
• XAMPP

MicroApache was the first thing i looked at, as the contact pointed out DokuWikiOnAStick, but that server doesn’t seem to have source, nor is the upstream web site there (last release seems to be 2007, so too old for Strawberry perl too) Server2Go looks nice, but as its not really free in the debian sense, I’ll pass on that unless nothing else works. XAMPP – unzipped it, foswiki and did some minor configurations. unziped, removed everything except apache, added strawberry perl, and wrote a systray icon and menu system for you to control it with. TADA! FoswikiOnAStick v0.1v0.3 (running foswiki 1.0.6). please try it out.

FoswikiOnaStick system tray menu

Instructions for use:

1. download the Foswiki on a Stick zip file
2. unzip it to the root of your USB key (or any drive)
3. start the systray app, web server and browser using start_foswiki.bat (goto http://localhost/ if the browser doesn’t start) (unblock / allow apache to get through the windows firewall)

before ejecting the usb key, you need to stop the webserver by running stop_foswiki.bat yes, thats all. Please report any issues or observations to me – SvenDowideit@fosiki.com

• the web server runs at the standard port 80, so if there is already a web server running it will fail
• when the web server starts, it will probably be blocked by Windows firewall – every time I’ve tested, a dialog pops up, and allows you to unblock it.
• ….

Warning

I have made no attempt (yet) to reduce the accesses to the disk – so it may use up all the blue smoke in your usbkey, cause your bits to turn green, or one of many other unforseen side effects which may or may not appear amusing if they happen to someone else. I’ve tested this on Windows7rc, Windows Vista, Windows2003server, and Windows XP – if it works for you, excellent .

SourceForge is running their fourth Community Choice Awards – you could vote for ‘Best Project for the Enterprise’ or even ‘Best New Project’

Wow, it seems we’re almost winners

see http://foswiki.org/downloads and http://fosiki.com/Foswiki_debian/ for more information.

I’ve just (finally) set up the auto unit test run, PerlCritic and release build for the Release01×00 branch, and fixed the trunk builder.

Foswiki trunk gets built every 6 hours, and Release01×00 every 12 (based on my Sydney TZ).

If the unit tests fail, and email will be sent to the foswiki-discuss mailing list – no news is good news. See the build output areas:

1. Foswiki trunk
2. Foswiki 1.0 release branch

where you will find the output log files, the built tar.gz and zip files and each of the component packages that make up a release.

I was just asked on IRC how to protect some attachments without forcing all requested attachments to go through the viewfile cgi script (as that causes your foswiki images and css to load incredibly slowly), and here’s the howto I answered with:

I coded foswiki 1.0’s viewfile script to work as an apache ErrorDocument, so If you can find a way to trigger a 404 or 401 error, you can get apache to run viewfile -

ErrorDocument 404 /foswiki/bin/viewfile
ErrorDocument 401 /foswiki/bin/viewfile

If you place your pub dir somewhere outside where apache serves files and then softlink the non-protected webs into apache’s path (so it serves them full speed), then the secured webs will generate a 404, triggering the viewfile ErrorDocument – which will thus serve the file only to authenticated users

This will work irrespective of the authentication choices in your foswiki setup – and as the files that require securing are outside apache’s file serving areas, can be considered as secure as possible.

As an added bonus, any request to a file that does not exist will show a foswiki error page, rather than a static html.