George has been leading the charge to a major bug fixing release of foswiki – we’ve resolved over 120 issues, and worked hard to improve security – dealing with some interesting cross site scripting issues found by ‘SonyStyles’, and then pushing on to harden the registration process to deal with spammers.

foswiki’s password system can now migrate your user’s password store to more modern encryption methods – the default that we shipped with Twiki can thus move from crypt to md5-apache.

4 days after the release, the installation and maintenance options for 1.1.5 have improved too:

1. my yum package repository (extensions too)
2. my debian package repository (extensions too)
3. my Foswiki on a USB stick for Windows
4. Oliver’s VirtualMachine

That’s right, on Redhat Enterprise and Centos, it’s now just as easy to install foswiki and its ~300 plugins as it is on Debian.

• Debian repository for foswiki
• Centos6 and RHEL6 repository for foswiki

This means that you can now manage your Enterprise Foswiki using the same package management tools as the rest of the operating system.

For example, I just installed a demo system with:

yum install foswiki-jhotdrawplugin foswiki-ldapcontrib foswiki-newuserplugin foswiki-glueplugin foswiki-ldapngplugin foswiki-calendarplugin foswiki-edittableplugin foswiki-interwikiplugin foswiki-renderlistplugin foswiki-smiliesplugin foswiki-tableplugin foswiki-directedgraphplugin

and when yum finished, I browse to http://server/foswiki/ and its up and running.

These packages are built by a script that downloads the latest packages from http://foswiki.org/Extensions, generates an EPM manifest and then builds rpm packages – every night. I have not yet tested them with Redhat Enterprise 6 or fedora

To try it out, you’ll need to add the EPEL repository, and then this one to your yum config:

su
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm
cd /etc/yum.repo.d/
wget http://fosiki.com/Foswiki_rpms/foswiki.repo

and then run

yum makecache

To see what foswiki extensions are available, run
yum search foswiki

To install foswiki, and some plugins:

yum install foswiki foswiki-workflowplugin foswiki-jscalendarcontrib foswiki-ldapcontrib

then browse to http://servername/foswiki/bin/configure to enable the plugin and configure settings.

I’ve spent the last few days working on getting data out of Sharepoint Wiki, and its shocking. If you read the webservices API and believe it, things would be simple. Sadly, its got some pretty major bugs, and some pretty woeful architecture too.

The worst finding is that although Sharepoint lists have a webservice API to get versioned data, its broken – all versions of the MetaInfo return the text of the last revision. So I had to resort to brute force html GET’s and parsing the html to try to get the historical info.

Still, data gathered and saved – next week I’ll start trying to extract the valuable user written text from the masses of shoddy html (like in MS Word to html, every line is surrounded by the same 100 character css styles, setting font to Verdana etc.

Kontextwork WebDAV

Using the WebDAV for foswiki Extension, you can seamlessly edit Microsoft Office files in Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and then save directly back into the Wiki.

Using WebDAV, users can get direct access to Wiki topics and attachments, via the WebDAV URL – making it possible to attach documents by drag and dropping them directly in Windows Explorer.

Some technical details

WebDAV for foswiki requires advanced libraries on the server – including Apache 2 mod_perl support. For full integration mode, some trust settings need to be changed in Internet Explorer, or an extension installed to Firefox.

Required Perl modules and extensions

• APR::Table
• APR::UUID
• Apache2::Access
• Apache2::Const
• Apache2::Module
• Apache2::RequestIO
• Apache2::RequestRec
• Data::Dumper
• Encode
• File::Find::Rule::Filesys::Virtual
• File::Spec
• POSIX
• URI
• URI::Escape
• XML::LibXML => than 1.64 (declaredPrefix function is needed)
• XML::Simple
• Filesys::Virtual
• POSIX
• File::Path
• JSON

Foswiki::Plugins::JQueryPlugin

I’ve just started work adding Matteo Bicocchi’s rather stunning mb.Components – starting with mb.Menu. Along the way, adding foswiki Macro’s to make it simpler for us to use, I’ve also made some changes to the code (which hopefully I can get integrated into an mb.Menu release) that I have attached to the live demo.

Here’s the all important Screenie:

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.

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 .