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TWiki Newsletter
Did you know about the TWiki announcement mailing list? It is a low volume list with security and release announcements and a periodical newsletter. Subscribe and never miss out on essential TWiki news. Read past newsletters here.

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TWiki.org Blog

     
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See also: Download TWiki, What is TWiki, Public TWiki Sites, TWiki screenshots, Social Media and Structured Wikis at Work - Enterprise Collaboration for Millennials, Getting Involved, TWiki Consultants

Ready for a regex challenge? Solve this puzzle!

2021-03-15 - 08:02 by PeterThoeny in Development
Regular expressions (regex for short) are powerful tools to analyze and manipulate text. They can be intimidating though. However, you can start small, and learn more as you keep using them. The presentation is a good place to get started. Coder on the verge of extinction Image source: ComicStrip How can you improve your regex skills? Here is a puzzle that will keep you busy for a while. When you solve this regex puzzle you may add a comment. However, shhh, don`t give away the secret, only... more...

TWiki turns 20!

2018-09-03 - 22:10 by PeterThoeny in Community
TWiki is no longer a teenager last month TWiki turned 20 years. As a kid, even though green, TWiki was trailblazing the enterprise collaboration space. Then as a teenager it was rebellious. Now TWiki continues as a responsible adults, with corporate contributions, while still enjoying its free nature, which is in its DNA from inception. TWiki is the result of passionate labor. So, celebrating and Labor Day seems appropriate. Thank you all who continue supporting the open source TWiki project... more...
Comments: 0 - latest comment by AdeleRay - 2018-09-28 - 10:41

TWiki-6.1.0 Released - Better Usability, Better App Platform

2018-08-20 - 02:15 by PeterThoeny in Development
TWiki 6.1.0 is released, shipped through the virtual door! This release brings a number of usability enhancements, and strengthens TWiki as an application platform. We recommend to upgrade to this latest release. The new release can be downloaded from TWiki.org and SourceForge.net. The TWiki VM has not yet been updated. TWiki`s user base consists of millions of users on tens of thousands of installations in over 130 countries, backed by an open source community of hundreds of contributors and... more...

GitForTWikiDevelopment

2018-03-20 - 20:11 by HaraldJoerg in Development
For a long time now, TWiki has been developed in Subversion, also known as SVN. However, since some years I`m using Git for other projects, and it has some features I really would like to use for TWiki as well. For example, in SVN it is pretty inefficient to run several branches in parallel with the monolith that is TWiki core, because in SVN every branch is a complete copy. Git handles this much better. So, all that stands in the way of moving to Git is the migration of the code (easy), the history... more...

Automatic TWiki Deployment

2017-12-06 - 20:11 by HaraldJoerg in Deployment
This year I haven`t done any TWiki development, but I`ve done a bit of testing, bug reporting/hunting/fixing, and taking care of support questions. While doing that, quite often I would have liked to create a fresh TWiki installation with a defined set of properties. These properties are not only what`s written in TWiki`s LocalSite.cfg , but also platform properties: On which operating system and under which Perl version TWiki is running, which versions of which CPAN modules are installed, which... more...
Comments: 0 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2017-12-07 - 05:04

How to: Create a Chat Application with a WebSocket

2016-04-05 - 07:56 by PeterThoeny in Development
WebSockets are a relatively recent addition to the World Wide Web. Sockets are well known in Unix and Linux for many years, used to create endpoints for communication between processes that look like files. The WebSocket specification takes that to the web, defining an API to establish a full duplex communication channel between a web browser and a server over a single TCP connection. Once established, the connection is persistent, which allows for fast communication between a browser and a server... more...

Nested Searches or Hash Searches

2016-03-12 - 20:41 by JaniHamalainen in General
I`m a fairly new user to TWiki and upon encountering a scenario where I needed to do a complicated search I remembered reading about the ability to do nested searches. I implemented the nested search only to find out that it was slower than I expected. It took me awhile to find out there was another option, using hashes as found in SpreadSheetPlugin. Using this approach, my page load time was reduced to about a third when compared to a nested search. The purpose of this blog entry is to... more...
Comments: 0 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2016-03-12 - 23:22

TWiki-6.0.2 Released - Better Usability, Better App Platform

2015-11-30 - 08:02 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
TWiki 6.0.2 is released, shipped through the virtual door! This is a patch release that brings some usability enhancements, such as easier installation, and strengthens TWiki as an application platform. The release also fixes a number of bugs, including SecurityAlert CVE 2014 9325 and SecurityAlert CVE 2014 9367. `Peter Thoeny`s concept of the structured wiki has been successful in a variety of environments, most prominently Google, but many others as well. Structured wikis add data in records and... more...

How to run TWiki reliably on a public website

2015-10-16 - 02:34 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
TWiki is typically used in an access restricted environment, such as behind a corporate firewall. There are many publicly accessible TWiki sites as well, such as the NIST Computing Collaboration Site, or this TWiki here on TWiki.org. If you run TWiki on a server accessible by the public you need to be address the following issues: 1. Unpredictable contributions how to nurture contributions, how to moderate content to retain quality. 2. Unpredictable server load how to curb rogue users and spiders... more...

Responsive Multi-Column Page Layout using CSS

2015-05-08 - 01:18 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
The internet becomes more and more mobile; mobile devices are used increasingly to access the internet and intranet, including company internal TWikis. The goal is to design websites that work equally well on desktop computers and mobile phones. Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience, easy reading, and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling, across a wide range of devices, from desktop computer... more...

Automate Workflows with If-Then-Actions

2015-04-30 - 04:28 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
TWiki has a new IfThenActionPlugin to automate workflows. Administrators can define if then actions that are triggered when a topic is viewed or saved, an attachment is uploaded, or a user registers. As an example action, every time a topic is viewed, another topic should be viewed in the background, with the purpose to refresh that other topic`s cache. Administrators define if then action rules in a table. The rules have format `if source then target`. The `if` is the trigger (if action), the `source... more...
Comments: 0 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2015-05-29 - 18:19

How Secure is your Passphrase? Generate a Dice-Indexed Passphrase using TWiki

2015-04-20 - 02:59 by PeterThoeny in Development
A passphrase acts as a master password that is used to securely store other passwords. It has to be strong so that it can`t be easily cracked and expose the other passwords. This blog has a dice indexed passphrase generator. The blog also serves as an example of what can be done with TWiki`s SpreadSheetPlugin functions and some HTML. This blog post is inspired by and references the article `that you can memorize but that even the NSA can`t guess` by Firstlook.org. It is easy to generate a random... more...

Setting and Getting JSON Objects using JSON Path

2015-03-30 - 20:28 by PeterThoeny in Development
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data interchange format based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language. It is easy for humans to read and write, and easy for machines to parse and generate. The latest SetGetPlugin now supports JSON Objects and JSON Path. A JSON object may contain: { `key1`: `value1`, `key2`: `value2`, ... } a hash with key/value pairs; the value can be another JSON object. `va1`, `val2`, `val3`, ... an array with values; the... more...
Comments: 0 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2015-07-15 - 18:17

Structured Wiki: Enterprise Wiki & Application Platform = Flexibility & Power

2014-11-01 - 07:47 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
TWiki is unique in the enterprise wiki space because it is also an application platform. Sharing content among team members in a wiki has many advantages, and brings transparency and accountability to the workplace. When you go a step further and use TWiki as a structured wiki you bring a whole new dimension to wiki collaboration: You can now automate your workflow with custom tailored wiki applications, which makes your whole organization more effective. You may ask why and how? Structured elements... more...

Announcement: TWiki-6.0.1 Released - Better Usability, Improved App Platform

2014-10-15 - 07:42 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
TWiki 6.0.1 is released, shipped through the virtual door! This is a patch release that brings a number of usability enhancements, such as drag drop file attachments, and strengthens TWiki as an application platform. The release also fixes a number of bugs, including SecurityAlert CVE 2014 7236 and SecurityAlert CVE 2014 7237. `Peter Thoeny`s concept of the structured wiki has been successful in a variety of environments, most prominently Google, but many others as well. Structured wikis add data... more...

Internet Slowdown to Protest for Net Neutrality

2014-09-10 - 20:58 by PeterThoeny in General
September 10th is the Internet Slowdown. Cable companies want to slow down your favorite sites, for profit. To fight back, TWiki.org is participating by adding a symbolic `loading` icon to remind everyone what an Internet without net neutrality would look like. Thousands of websites do the same today to raise the awareness and drive record numbers of emails and calls to lawmakers. Concerned about net neutrality? Here is how you can help: more and take action Do you run a website? Add... more...

Häppy Collaboration at Work!

2014-08-16 - 22:21 by PeterThoeny in Community
The Open Source TWiki Team wishes you H ppy Collaboration at Work! Peter Thoeny, TWiki.org Founder more...

Attachment drag and drop with the updated PatternSkin

2014-05-28 - 02:25 by HideyoImazu in Usability
PatternSkin now has an HTML5 based attachment drag and drop capability. It will be part of the upcoming TWiki 6.0.1 release. You can use the drag and drop feature simply by installing the latest version from PatternSkin if you are running TWiki 5.0 or newer. It leverages the DropzoneJS JavaScript library. With HTML5 capable browsers (including but not limited to Chrome 7 , Firefox 4 , IE 10 , Safari 6 ), on the Attach page, the `Choose file` button https://twiki.org/p/pub/Blog/BlogEntry201405x2/choose... more...
Comments: 0 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2014-05-28 - 17:35

How to create a print button that opens up a print dialog box

2014-05-16 - 03:57 by PeterThoeny in Development
I was tasked to add a print button to a TWiki application that opens up a print dialog box. This one click option is more user friendly than the standard Print Version File Print option. Searching the internet I discovered that this is possible with some JavaScript. The button could be added directly in topics, but it makes more sense to add it to a header topic that is included by application topics. Example header topic of a knowledge base application: Print this page Title: The sky... more...

How to cache a sidebar for better performance

2013-12-27 - 01:08 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
If your TWiki has a sidebar, top bar or bottom bar that has a lot of dynamic content it can slow down your whole TWiki browsing experience. For example, displaying topic children in a hierarchical tree using TreePlugin can be slow. In this case it can pay off to cache the included sidebar and update it in regular intervals. This is a step by step guide on how to cache the WebLeftBar in the Sandbox web. The same can be applied to any other included topic in any web. 1. Create the cache directory... more...
Comments: 0 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-12-28 - 06:50

Download & How To: VMware Virtual Machine With CentOS 6.4 64-bit Minimal and Apache Webserver

2013-10-28 - 02:17 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
CentOS (Community Enterprise Operating System) is a very popular Linux distribution based on RedHat Enterprise Linux. The default CentOS distribution is too bloated for webserver use. This article describes how to build and use a VMware virtual machine containing a minimal CentOS 6.4 64 bit guest operating system, enhanced with libraries typically needed in a server environment. The VMware virtual machine image can be downloaded as well, which enables you to quickly and easily run Linux on Windows... more...

Announcement: TWiki-6.0.0 Released - Better Usability, Scalability & App Platform

2013-10-22 - 09:07 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
TWiki 6.0.0 is released, shipped through the virtual door! This is a major release that has a shiny new dashboard look, brings many usability enhancements, strengthens TWiki as an application platform, and scales to very large deployments with thousands of webs and a tens of thousands of users. The new release can be downloaded from TWiki.org and SourceForge.net. The TWiki VM, a VMware based virtual machine will be updated shortly. `Peter Thoeny`s concept of the structured wiki has been successful... more...

TWiki formatting - Doing a test report

2013-08-07 - 21:05 by StefanAlthoefer in Applications
Recently I started creating test reports in our company`s Twiki, which is already used for project management and knowledge base. Below you find some formatting tricks that I use for consistent rendering and topic automation. Tables For compact presentation of test conditions I wanted a two column table, like in the image shown. But alas, in the right column I need structured text which is not possible with Twiki`s lightwight table implementation. I considered some solution: HTML hacks wich... more...
Comments: 0 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-08-07 - 22:59

Advanced TWiki Spreadsheet Formulas: Power and Flexibility - Not For Grandma

2013-03-25 - 04:14 by PeterThoeny in Development
TWiki`s SpreadSheetPlugin just got 9 new functions that add hash capabilities to TWiki. But first some history. Spreadsheets became accessible to the masses in the eighties when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created VisiCalc for the Apple II and later for PCs. They became ubiquitous with Excel; it seems like everybody is using them nowadays, at least to maintain data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were initially developed to automate paper based accounting worksheets. Formulas can be placed in table... more...
Comments: 4 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2014-10-24 - 18:53

New TWiki Extensions to Watch Pages, Get Notified, Connect to SAP, JIRA, and More

2013-03-16 - 03:55 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
TWiki.org has a lot of activity recenty, especially on the extensions. Here is a quick overview on some new plugins release in the last few weeks. TWiki has a new WatchlistPlugin. It does what you know from the watchlist feature on Wikipedia namely you can watch (and unwatch) pages of interest, and see recent changes on all watched pages. Watching pages is a great way to boost collaboration at a rapid pace. In addition to Wikipedia`s watchlist feature, TWiki`s plugin also includes optional e mail... more...

TWiki-5.1.4 Released: Get. Work. Done.

2013-02-18 - 09:13 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
We just released TWiki 5.1.4 it can be downloaded immediately from TWiki.org and SourceForge.net. The TWiki VM, a VMware based virtual machine has been updated as well. This release supersedes earlier TWiki 5.1 releases, which introduced many usability enhancements, such as point and click user data management, more visual user profile pages with picture selector, and a backup feature to help upgrade TWiki sites. TWiki 5.1 also strengthens TWiki as an application platform to more easily build custom... more...

TWiki-5.1.3 Released: Usable. Fun. Powerful.

2012-12-17 - 09:24 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
We just released TWiki 5.1.3, it can be downloaded immediately from TWiki.org and SourceForge.net. The TWiki VM, a VMware based virtual machine has been updated as well. I`d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to this release. In all, 50 people are listed in the Istanbul Hall of Fame. Thank you! This release supersedes earlier TWiki 5.1 releases, which introduced many usability enhancements, such as point and click user data management, more visual user profile pages with... more...

Generate Fun Text for Social Media: Strike Out, Mirror, Flipped & Upside Down Text

2012-11-20 - 05:42 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
This text tool is for fun and to learn Javascript. If you want strike out text, mirrored text, flipped text or upside down text, then this is it. You can copy and paste from this tool into Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and other sites. How does this work? The text appears to be stuck out, mirrored, flipped, or upside down, and it is possible to paste it into text boxes on Facebook and other websites, even though there is no such thing as an strike out or upside down character set. Some drawing... more...
Comments: 0 - latest comment by VivianLee - 2016-01-11 - 23:44

TWiki-5.1.2 Released: Rock Solid. Usable. Fun.

2012-10-10 - 08:22 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
We just released TWiki 5.1.2, it can be downloaded immediately from TWiki.org and SourceForge.net. The TWiki VM will be updated as well in the next few days. I`d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to this release, especially to our release manager George Trubisky. In all, 50 people are listed in the Istanbul Hall of Fame. Thank you! This release supersedes earlier TWiki 5.1 releases, which introduced many usability enhancements, such as point and click user data management... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:17

Free Geolocation Lookup - Where is This Website or IP Address?

2012-08-14 - 05:57 by PeterThoeny in Applications
This blog post has two purposes: 1. Free application to find the geolocation (geographical location) of an Internet domain name or an IP (Internet Protocol) address. Multiple addresses can be specified. 2. How to: This application uses TWiki`s GeoLookupPlugin and some SpreadSheetPlugin magic to provide real time lookup of addresses. Scroll down to learn how this works; this is a good learning opportunity for TWiki application developers. IP Address / Domain Name(s)... more...

Häppy 25th Birthday, HyperCard!

2012-08-11 - 17:08 by PeterThoeny in General
25 years ago today, Apple genius Atkinson held a press conference at MacWorld in Boston to unveil HyperCard. Apple pitched HyperCard as a way to hyperlink together a series of graphic cards or screens. The cards had the sort of detail that required bitmapped graphics, which Apple knew how to deliver. Because the cards were bitmapped, they tended to highlight their uniqueness, like the pages of a highly designed magazine. The most important feature though was the hyperlink, you can click to jump to... more...

The Internet Map - Fascinating Ways to Visualize the Web

2012-07-31 - 07:29 by PeterThoeny in General
The Internet Map (click to enlarge) Ruslan Enikeev created a cool interactive map of the Internet. The four biggest circles are google.com, facebook.com, youtube.com and yahoo.com. TWiki.org is a tiny spec next to facebook.com. In total, the whole map depicts 350,000 sites and two million links from 196 countries. Each site is represented by a circle, whose size depends on the amount of traffic, and the space between each one is determined by the frequency with which users jump from one to another... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:16

Open Source License vs. Copyright vs. Trademark - How They Differ

2012-07-19 - 21:46 by PeterThoeny in General
This article is intended for busy business people with interest in open source. I have seen that there are misconceptions on open source licensing, copyright and trademark. I am not a lawyer, so this is not legal advise. This article should give you a good overview on this topic. To summarize: Open source license: What you can do; how you can redistribute the software. Copyright: Who owns the intellectual property of the software. Trademark: Who is allowed to use the brand name for... more...
Comments: 6 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2014-02-20 - 02:31

How to: Single Sign-on, a Convenient Way to Authenticate Users

2012-06-29 - 06:47 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
Single sign on (SSO) is a way to authenticate users on multiple related, but independent software systems. Once logged in, a user can switch from one system to the next without the need to login again. Conversely, single sign off is a way to log out and terminate access to multiple software systems with a single sign off action. In contrast, a shared authentication scheme that requires the user to log in multiple times using the same identity is not called SSO. An example is a central user directory... more...
Comments: 4 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-09-26 - 21:29

What Are Transclusions? How to Use Them in TWiki Applications

2012-05-27 - 18:26 by PeterThoeny in Development
Transclusion is the inclusion of a document or part of a document into another document by reference. For example, press releases have an about section. Rather than copying the about section over and over again, a transclusion embodies a modular design by allowing the about text to be stored only once and included in the press releases. Ted Nelson (who also coined the words `hypertext` and `hypermedia`) introduced the term `transclusion` in his 1982 book, Literary Machines. Parameterization allows... more...

Social Media Software: A Crowded Space - Not Just Facebook

2012-05-19 - 08:22 by PeterThoeny in Social Business
Social Media is everywhere. As it is with many things, new technology is first pushed in the consumer space, then enters the enterprise market. Friday was a big event for social media when Facebook went public and was valued at $100B (that is a 1 with 11 zeros). Everybody defines social media differently. Wikipedia defines it currently as follows: Social media includes web based and mobile based technologies which are used to turn communication into interactive dialogue between organizations, communities... more...

Book: Information System Design Using TWiki

2012-05-14 - 08:08 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
Book by PhilGochenour, XML Press, ISBN:978 0982219171, Apr 2012. `Combining real world experience with a veteran teacher`s ability to communicate, Phil Gochenour`s Information System Design Using TWiki demonstrates the basic principles behind any system design, whether it`s a cookbook or a software company`s wiki. Gochenour`s book builds an information system step by step, starting with the building block of all information systems, the topic, and continuing through metadata, search, to usability... more...

How to Debug Networked Apps Using Tcpdump

2012-05-06 - 02:06 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
I recently did yet another LDAP / Active Directory integration for a TWiki installation. LDAP has many knobs to turn, it can be challenging to configure it properly. In this case we had an issue where some users could authenticate, and others not. You can turn on debugging in the LdapContrib, but it did not help pinpointing the issue. TWiki communicates with the LDAP server over port 389. Wouldn`t it be nice to see what gets sent back and forth across the network? That is where network monitoring... more...

TWiki Screenshots: How to get work done using TWiki

2012-04-23 - 22:20 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
TWiki.org has a new gallery of screenshots illustrating how TWiki is used to get work done. These screenshots just scratch the surface: TWiki has a lot of functionality, it can further be enhanced with hundreds of extensions. The screenshots show some of the enterprise wiki functionality: The editing experience, user profile pages, admin functionality, and functions for power users. Some screenshots of TWiki applications demonstrate the application platform feature of TWiki. Finally there... more...

Public TWiki Sites

2012-03-29 - 06:44 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
TWiki as an Open Source Enterprise Wiki and Web Application Platform is primarily designed to be used at the workplace. Millions of people in over 50,000 organizations use TWiki at work, from small deployments to some large ones that have several 100,000 pages and over 10,000 users. Most TWiki sites are access restricted, nevertheless there are also many public TWiki sites. Here are a few examples. RenderMan TWiki, Escape Studios, Pixar, Disney Nice case study of a public TWiki... more...

TWiki Foundation Plan & Personal Change for TWiki Founder

2012-03-01 - 05:10 by PeterThoeny in Community
TWiki was born as a collaborative project 14 years ago. The TWiki project changed the workplace for many people in a fundamental way, bringing more transparency, accountability and flexibility to the workplace. In the last release meeting we briefly discussed the idea of creating a foundation for the open source TWiki project. I believe it is time to initiate a foundation so that we can get broader participation by the community. I would also like to share some related news with the TWiki community... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:28

TWiki.org Blackout to Fight Internet Censorship a Success

2012-01-19 - 07:46 by PeterThoeny in General
On Tuesday I was asked if TWiki.org was going to participate in today`s blackout campaign to protest against SOPA and PIPA, the legislation to combat piracy currently in discussion in Washington DC. I first intended to just add a yellow box on the homepage asking to contact a representative to oppose these legislative bills, because they would censor the Internet and stifle innovation. There is a lot of coverage on the issue. I found these two most striking: 1. TED talk by Clay Shirky: Defend our... more...
Comments: 5 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:31

New TWiki-5.1.1 Release: Easy to Use, Easy to Upgrade

2012-01-16 - 09:49 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
Great work, TWiki.org team! Year over year you create rock solid code. You guys rock! We just released TWiki 5.1.1 aka Istanbul Release. A big THANK YOU to everybody who contributed to this release! And special thanks to our release manager GeorgeTrubisky who built this release. We invite developers who appreciate to work on quality code to join us, get involved! TWiki 5.1.1 is now available for download from the http://twiki.org/ website. This is a patch release that adds some minor new features... more...

TWiki I/O Architecture Explained

2011-12-20 - 05:51 by PeterThoeny in Development
TWiki as an enterprise wiki is frequently used across many teams in an organization. Over time more and more content is maintained in TWiki. Teams use many other enterprise systems in their daily activities, such as bug trackers in Engineering, CRM and ERP systems in Sales, and inventory systems in IT. With this there is a need to make these systems talk to each other. When an enterprise wiki is used as an intranet it lends itself to become the platform to glue these enterprise systems together.... more...

Case Study: How 10,000 Researchers at CERN Collaborate Using TWiki

2011-11-15 - 01:17 by PeterJones in Deployment
CERN, the Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world`s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. At the European Laboratory for High Energy Physics, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator is colliding beams of protons at energies of 3.5 TeV, recreating conditions close to those at the origin of the Universe. The four main LHC experiments, Alice, Atlas, CMS and LHCb are complex detectors with millions of output channels. These experiment detectors, large as cathedrals... more...

How to Export TWiki Data in CSV Format for Use in Excel

2011-11-11 - 21:25 by PeterThoeny in Development
Sometimes it is desirable to export TWiki forms based data from TWiki applications. CSV (comma separated values) is a simple file format that is widely supported by many applications, including spreadsheet programs such as Excel. This blog introduces the CSV format and explains how to generate a CSV file on the fly in a TWiki application. The CSV format is not clearly defined, there is no real CSV standard. In common usage almost any delimiter separated text data may be referred to as a CSV file... more...

Two Adopted Real-World Solutions for Enterprise Collaboration

2011-11-01 - 06:16 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
I gave two technical sessions last month at the Valley Code Camp, one on How to Run a Long Background Process in a Web Application, the other one on How to Create a TWiki Application. Video blogger David Spark of Media Solutions and Dice interviewed me about real world examples of enterprise collaboration. I mentioned two TWiki related examples. David Spark interviewing Peter Thoeny: Two Adopted Real World Solutions for Enterprise Collaboration. David Spark: Collaboration across the enterprise is... more...

Super Angel Ron Conway Talks About Entrepreneurship, Early Google and Facebook

2011-10-27 - 09:43 by PeterThoeny in Social Business
Yesterday I attended a Rajeev Circle event at Stanford University. Professor Rajeev Motwani was an extraordinary connector between Stanford University and the entrepreneurial world in the Silicon Valley and beyond. The Rajeev Circle meets regularly to further his legacy in the areas of science, mentorship, investment and philanthropy. In yesterday`s meeting we had the honor of getting advise from Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, Ron Conway, super angel of the Silicon Valley, and others... more...

How to: Turn Text Upside Down

2011-10-19 - 08:23 by PeterThoeny in Development
Want to surprise your friends on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus? How does this work? The text appears to be upside down (flipped), and it is possible to paste it into text boxes on Facebook and other websites, even though there is no such thing as an upside down character set. Some drawing programs offer text rotation, but that is handled at the application level. So how does upside text work in normal text input fields? Most websites nowadays support Unicode, which is a universal standard to represent... more...

Case Study: Morgan Stanley has Globally Replicated Intranet TWiki With 30,000 Users, 500,000 Pages

2011-10-03 - 20:56 by JitendraKavathekar in Deployment
At Twiki we are fortunate to have a large and active base of users. Due to the long term success of the TWiki open source project, we estimate about 50,000 teams use the collaboration platform world wide, across Fortune 500, Governments, Universities, and SMB. One of the perks of selling enterprise software is the opportunity to meet a range of great customers using our technology in interesting ways. This blog is a shortened version of a Inc blog. Recently a VP of IT at Morgan Stanley submitted... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-11-20 - 19:23

How to Use Regular Expressions to Parse Nested Structures

2011-09-15 - 08:09 by PeterThoeny in Development
This is an advanced topic that teaches how to to parse nested tree structures such as programming languages and spreadsheet formulas using regular expressions in Perl. The article is generic enough to be used in other languages that support regular expressions. expressions are very powerful to parse and modify text. They are also very fast in processing large text over and over again. For example, the TWiki engine makes heavy use of regular expressions to turn TML (TWiki Markup Language) into HTML... more...
Comments: 4 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2021-03-11 - 09:25

How to Run a Long Background Process in a Web App

2011-09-07 - 05:48 by PeterThoeny in Development
Web applications need to respond quickly to user actions. From a usability point of view, anything that takes longer than a second or two will distract the user from the task at hand. What can be done if a process takes longer, or much longer? When I implemented the BackupRestorePlugin I realized that taking a backup of a midsize TWiki site can take many minutes, which is too long for a web page to load the browser might even time out. Here is what should happen as seen by the administrator who... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:32

TWiki Has a New Solution for Point & Click TWiki Upgrade

2011-09-06 - 07:07 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
TWiki has a reputation of being difficult to upgrade. The TWikiUpgradeGuide describes how to upgrade TWiki, which is a manual and elaborate process that can take a long time. No more. TWiki has now a point click solution to upgrade a TWiki site with the help of the latest BackupRestorePlugin released on 2011 09 05. The plugin can be installed on older TWiki releases as low as TWiki 2001 09 01 (Athens Release) to easily create a backup that can be restored on a new TWiki release. On restore it is... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:36

TWiki.org Announces TWiki-5.1 General Availability

2011-08-29 - 04:57 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
New TWiki 5.1 release for enterprise collaboration with primary focus on usability for non technical users. TWiki`s user base consists of millions of users on 50,000 installations in over 130 countries, backed by an open source community of hundreds of contributors and 50,000 twiki.org users. On behalf of the TWiki.org community I would like to announce the general availability of TWiki 5.1 Community Release. The primary focus of this release is usability enhancements, such as point and click user... more...
Comments: 3 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:36

Wiki Applications and The Long Tail

2011-06-04 - 05:38 by PeterThoeny in Social Business
First, what is Long Tail? From Wikipedia: `The Long Tail refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a `normal` or Gaussian distribution. The Long Tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying this strategy.` In statistical terms, the horizontal axis of the graph represents a sorted data set... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:39

Social Media at Work: Viral Shift towards Information Age

2011-05-30 - 23:47 by PeterThoeny in Social Business
Over the last decade I have seen organizations change fundamentally by applying wikis and other social media technologies at work. I was recently invited to speak at a panel on `Social Business as the New Organizing Principle` organized by Bay Organizational Development Network (OSBN) on 2011 05 02 where we talked about the paradigm shift social media brings at the workplace, some of which I am sharing here on twiki.org with a broader audience. Key point: Organizations that adopt social media internally... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:41

How to Create an Amazon EC2 Instance (and Install TWiki)

2011-05-28 - 19:53 by PeterThoeny in General
I recently installed TWiki in the cloud, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). I am sharing my installation experience for all to enjoy. EC2 is part of Amazon Web Services (AWS), allowing users to rent virtual computers on which to run software. EC2 allows scalable deployment of applications by providing a Web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to create a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an `instance`, containing an operating system and any software desired... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by SachinKumar - 2016-03-06 - 08:30

How to Create Image-less Gauges

2011-05-25 - 05:12 by PeterThoeny in Development
Do you have a need to show gauges in your TWiki or HTML pages? TWiki has a GaugePlugin to show images like or /Plugins/GaugePlugin/tambar1.gif or /Plugins/GaugePlugin/trendup.gif. Those are bitmap images generated on the fly based on some parameters. Showing a page with hundreds of gauges (for example to show server status in a data center) can be slow. This is mainly attributed to the many connections the browser has to make, one for each image download. The latest GauglePlugin released a few days... more...

Introduction to QR Code, a Matrix Barcode

2011-02-13 - 08:51 by PeterThoeny in General
QR Code is a two dimensional barcode developed by Denso Wave in Japan. It is very popular in Japan and is getting more popular in the USA. For example, offers a QR Code for each shortened link. Many smartphones (Android, iPhone, Nokia etc) have applications to quickly navigate to a website, dial a number or add a contact, all simply by taking a photo of a Wikipedia:QR Code QR Code. QR is the abbreviation for Quick Response, as the creator intended the code to be decoded at high speed. Try it... more...
Comments: 4 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2014-03-27 - 17:26

Twiki robot in Super Bowl car commercial?

2011-02-08 - 05:01 by PeterThoeny in General
There was a short glimpse of a robot getting loaded into a car in a commercial of yesterday`s Super Bowl. Was it the Twiki robot from the old television series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century? Almost, but not really: vs. Interest in open source? Get involed and participate in a leading open source project that is used by millions of people around the world! This is not really related to TWiki (as in enterprise collaboration software), but I thought worth while sharing with the community... more...

Web 2.0 Primer: How Does Ajax Work? With Ajax Example

2011-01-07 - 11:24 by PeterThoeny in Development
By now you are very familiar with Ajax: Photos on Facebook load in the background without reloading the whole page, and when you type a word into the Google search box, the search results updates while you type. How does this work? Ajax, which is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, does the magic. Let`s first review the summary on Wikipedia:Ajax: `Ajax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client side to create interactive web applications. With Ajax, web applications... more...
Comments: 5 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:25

Point and Click: Color Picker / Color Code Generator

2011-01-05 - 07:56 by PeterThoeny in General
Color: Do you need to pick a color for your web pages? Use the color picker to the left; point and click, then copy the hexadecimal color code to your website or TWiki. The color picker uses the intuitive HSL (hue, saturation, and lightness) color space rather than the more common HSB (hue, saturation, and brightness), which means it`s easy to make a color brighter without touching its saturation, or vice versa. This is a jQuery based widget called Farbtastic, developed by Steven Wittens of Acko... more...

New TWiki-5.0.1 Release: Focus on Usability and Quality

2010-10-15 - 23:03 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
New TWiki 5.0.1 Release With Magic Release Date: 10 10 10 It took 4 month to release the first patch release after TWiki 5.0.0, not seen since the very early days of TWiki. This is the result of the community focusing on quality. We had no need to release immediate patch releases as it was the case with the 4.1 and 4.2 releases. The TWiki 5.0.0 release introduced many usability enhancements (such as the new TopMenuSkin), plugin enhancements, Application Platform enhancements, as well as security... more...

How to Create a TWiki Application

2010-09-10 - 00:18 by PeterThoeny in Applications
TWiki applications are a wonderful part of TWiki. They help automate workflows you have at the workplace. I am writing this how to blog because not many people know about this very useful feature TWiki offers as a structured wiki. TWiki has a built in database that can be used to write custom web applications. These are wiki applications that run in TWiki! Here are some ideas on what is possible: Need to automate status reporting for your teams? Write a status reporting application with... more...
Comments: 8 - latest comment by EmielVanRiel - 2017-07-17 - 13:01

New TWiki-5.0.0 Release, Growing TWiki Community

2010-06-03 - 18:07 by PeterThoeny in General
TWiki.org has a new look. We just released TWiki 5.0.0. We enjoy increased contributions in the community. You can join us! TWiki 5.0 has many enhancements in features, security and usability. We also strengthened TWiki as an application platform. But the main focus was on usability. Historically, TWiki is used mainly in Engineering and IT. We see a big shift towards collaborative platforms at the workplace, and TWiki is often in the middle of it. We fixed many usability issues and made TWiki more... more...

New OpenID integration for TWiki to login with AOL, Google, Verisign and other OpenID accounts

2010-05-03 - 09:22 by IanKluft in Deployment
TWiki has a new OpenID login feature. It allows users to log in to TWiki sites which have enabled this feature, using accounts from an OpenID provider. OpenID has been growing around the Internet recently. In response to user frustration with having to remember a login and password for every different web site, many organizations worked together to develop the OpenID standard. It allows users the convenience of using one account at an OpenID Provider (OP) to log into any sites which can act as... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:43

New TopMenuSkin for Better Usability and Functionality

2010-04-23 - 21:55 by PeterThoeny in Deployment
TWiki has a new skin called TopMenuSkin that will be part of the upcoming TWiki 5.0 release. The default PatternSkin is very functional and has been refined over time. The new TopMenuSkin is derived from the PatternSkin and adds better usability and a corporate look, inspired by the TWikiNetSkin and Apple. We had these design goals in mind: Conserve screen real estate: Remove sidebar, make top bar more narrow (think Facebook) Usability: Intuitive and simple to use, reduce number of clicks... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:43

Case Study: TWiki at Consultancy Aseaco AG

2010-02-25 - 10:38 by MichaelGulitz in Deployment
As a mid size consulting company offering higly specialized services for SAP customers we were facing the requirement to create a new infrastructure for inhouse knowledge transfer. Up to then the existing solutions we were using created huge dumps of single documents of almost every possible format. Searching across documents was not possible and thus the overall usage of the system declined. As a result most of our knowledge was kept isolated in everybody`s mind and personal laptop. While focusing... more...

Lunch & Learn Webinar: Structured Wikis at Work - Enterprise 2.0 in Action

2010-02-24 - 19:44 by PierreKhawand in General
Please join us for tomorrow`s webinar on: Structured Wikis at Work Enterprise 2.0 in Action. A wiki enables teams to organize and share content and knowledge in an organic and free manner, and to schedule, manage and document their daily activities. Learn from the founder of TWiki (Peter Thoeny), the leading open source enterprise Wiki what exactly a wiki is, and how you can use it to enhance the communications within your organization and between organizations. Learn also how a structured wiki... more...

Adding Geolocation to TWiki

2010-01-24 - 05:52 by PeterThoeny in Applications
TWiki is continuing its path of innovation: TWiki has now plugin for geolocation. Geolocation is the identification of the real world geographic location of an Internet connected computer, mobile device, website visitor or other. IP address geolocation data can include information such as country, region, city, postal/zip code, latitude, longitude and timezone.Ref. Wikipedia The recently released GeoLookupPlugin can be used to retrieve geolocation by IP address or domain name. This includes latitude... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:20

Did TWiki.org go commercial?

2009-11-11 - 19:58 by PeterThoeny in Community
Once in a while I get asked if TWiki.org went commercial. I believe a clarifying blog post (on 12 month old news) is warranted because I have seen a lot of inaccurate and false statements in blogs and tweets on this subject. Short answer: TWiki.org has been an active open source project since its inception 11 years ago and will remain open source. A year ago we introduced a code of conduct and a TWiki Community Governance modeled after the successful Ubuntu community with the goal to scale the... more...

Evolution of TWiki use at TU Delft

2009-11-05 - 22:33 by PeterThoeny in Community
The Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands is running TWiki since 2004 at wiki.tudelft.nl. They created a nice visualization of the evolution of TWiki use from the very beginning, 5 years ago. Each node is a page, links are connections between pages. The graph is laid out using a force directed algorithm, where the edges (links between pages) pull the nodes (pages) together, and the nodes (pages) repel each other. IgorNikolic and Chris Davis created the visualization and the... more...

TWiki User Meetup and Enterprise 2.0 Keynote in San Francisco, Nov 2009

2009-10-28 - 08:18 by PeterThoeny in Community
Dear TWiki users in the San Francisco Bay Area: Our fourth Silicon Valley TWiki User Meet up is happening in San Francisco to coincide with the Enterprise 2.0 Expo on 2009 11 04. This is a good opportunity to mingle with wiki aficionados and to learn from each other what does/does not work when deploying a wiki at work. The organizers hope you can join the event, and possibly present how your organization is using TWiki? Place is TBD, watch TWikiMeetUpInSiliconValley for updates. Great News! TWiki... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:45

Please vote for TWiki at Enterprise 2.0 Conference Launchpad

2009-10-12 - 23:44 by PeterThoeny in Community
TWiki got selected as a Quarter Finalist at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Launchpad contest. The Launchpad is looking for innovative applications to feature at the conference in San Francisco, 2009 11 02 to 04. Please support the TWiki project by voting for TWiki! Please don`t delay, the deadline is this Wed 2009 10 14. With your help we have a good chance of winning, which helps promote the open source TWiki project. Vote at http://launchpad.e2conf.com/vote now/ (scroll down in the iFrame)... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:45

TWiki.org Community Update, September 2009

2009-10-05 - 22:45 by PeterThoeny in Community
The TWiki.org community has been working hard on our upcoming Helsinki release along with making regular patch releases for the current version of TWiki. I would like to highlight some of the great work that people in the community have been doing during the month of September. First, a big thank you to the 11 people who attended our release meetings in September: Alex Bernegger, Ian Kluft, Jordan Koppole, Klaus Ethgen, Luke Vi, Milind Pansare, Peter Jones, Peter Nixon, Sopan Shewale and Steve Mokris... more...

Please support the open source TWiki project

2009-07-11 - 02:51 by PeterThoeny in Community
The TWiki project got nominated as one of 10 finalists in the `Best Project for Enterprise` category at the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards 2009, this among 230,000 open source projects! We got nominated because of you, our passionate TWiki user community! Thank you very much! Voting is currently going on and closes on 20 Jul 2009. With your help we have a good shot at winning the Enterprise category! Voting is simple: Visit at http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09/vote/?f 426 to vote... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:46

Sun Blue Print -- Best Practices for Deploying TWiki On GlassFish/LRWPinJava

2009-05-14 - 19:37 by NagendraNagarajayya in General
`Best Practices for Deploying TWiki Software On GlassFish Application Server Using LRWPinJava`, a Sun blue print document for deploying TWiki applications has been published at the below URL: http://wikis.sun.com/display/BluePrints/Best Practices for Deploying TWiki Software On GlassFish Application Server Using LRWPinJava The Best Practices document describes running TWiki software under Glassfish/LRWPinJava with a 2x improvement in performance compared to Apache 2.0. A real use case,... more...

Nominate TWiki for 2009 SourceForge.net Community Choice Award

2009-05-13 - 23:44 by PeterThoeny in Community
The TWiki community needs your support! SourceForge.net is currently accepting nominations for their annual Community Choice Awards. They will be accepting nominations until May 29th, and the ten projects with the most nominations in each category will become finalists. Please project url http://TWiki.org/ nominate the open source TWiki at: Let`s try to get TWiki into the finalists for `Best Project for the Enterprise` and `Most likely to change the way you do everything` ! (Make sure... more...
Comments: 5 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:47

Happy New Year -- 10 Years TWiki!

2009-01-02 - 07:05 by PeterThoeny in Community
Incredibly, TWiki is now 10 years young! Although I started TWiki in 1998, the oldest TWiki distribution I found is TWiki19990120.zip, e.g. 20 Jan 1999. TWiki re defined the wiki space from a pure shared publishing platform, to an enterprise wiki, to a web application platform. JostSpot copied the application wiki concept, but was later relaunched as Google Sites with stripped out application programmability. Other wikis follow the TWiki foot steps, such as XWiki and TikiWiki. From the bottom of... more...

Relaunch TWiki.org Project

2008-10-27 - 19:55 by PeterThoeny in Community
There are some tremendous opportunities for our project. In order to take full advantage of these, today Peter Thoeny and the management team at NET decided to re launch the TWiki.org project with a new governance model. We want to reach out to all community members to explain: why we decided to do this some thoughts on our new top level direction our invitation to re confirm your membership in the community We invite you to participate in this exciting new direction. Please read... more...

Project Network Diagrams From Tables

2008-10-26 - 02:33 by SeanCMorgan in Applications
Introduction CPM/PERT diagrams (which Microsoft Project refers to by the ambiguous name of `network diagrams`) are useful for planning what needs to be done in what order. Often thought of as a `one off` project planning aid, more generally these precedence diagrams can be used for visualizing recurring procedures like the operations in a manufacturing assembly line, or even a guided procedure for business processes (like on boarding an employee, which can include orientation, provisioning of equipment... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:52

First TWiki book ever ... in German language!

2008-10-22 - 05:09 by WolfMarbach in General
There we go! I would like to announce that there will be the first book about TWiki in German language available from November this year! Being passionate about TWiki since more than one year I thought that TWiki certainly deserves some more attention as it is the greatest Wiki ever! Since the twiki.org website and the documentation are of no real marketing benefit I wrote a book to introduce the power of TWiki to the market. The book starts with installing TWiki to write your first small plugin... more...
Comments: 3 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:53

Issues Upgrading TWiki

2008-10-17 - 19:04 by ChrisHogan in Usability
Having just made some positive comments in my last couple of blog posts, I must also, sadly, make some negative ones. The capability of the configure script to import plugins is I think a great advance a great shame I can`t use it. My ISP has a certain set structure to its direcotries and my TWiki installationis therefore undera `TWiki` sirectry alongside the `cgi bin`. The configure scriptseems to think the subdiredtories of TWiki are at the same level as cgi bin, so it copies the installer scripts... more...

ISO 9000 Compliance System

2008-10-17 - 18:51 by ChrisHogan in General
On the same theme as my last post, we;ve also been able to implement an ISO 9000 compliance monitoring system. We`re members of the Professional contractors Group who ahev a scheme which is approved and has many accredited users: http://www.PCGQS.ORG.UK It has its own system, based on an SVN repository, but it didn`t have the dynamic capability of a TWIki based system. We`ve subsituted the static word excel documents the PCG provided with interactive TWiki forms. It`s already had a major impact... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:34

TWiki Based Accounting

2008-10-17 - 18:41 by ChrisHogan in General
A somewhat belated posting. Last year I started to port a number of spreadsheets I had into TWiki. I based topics on someexamples I found on the main TWiki site, such as the account ledger which used a `mashup` of the Spreadsheetplugin the Commentplugin. The result is a number of different tools: a petty cash balance, a mileage caulcator for expenses; a credit card reconciiation; bank statment reconciliation. Obviously, I`ve used attachmentsto hold scans of invoices to us. It now has an invoicing... more...
Comments: 3 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:52

New release of ToolTipPlugin addresses security issue

2008-10-03 - 02:23 by GeorgeClark in General
I`ve fixed a security issue in the TWiki:Plugins.ToolTipPlugin. Any sites using this Plugin should upgrade to the newest version. If your site uses any topic or web view access restrictions, it`s especially important to update. The exposure has existed going back at least a couple of years. TWikibug:Item6040 addresses the issue. The fixed plugin is version 17565 (02 Oct 2008) or later. more...

TWIKI as foundation for the "NEST" Project Platform

2008-10-02 - 09:48 by MarkoRintamaki in General
TWIKI as foundation for NEST 1.1 Project Platform Hi TWIKI community! I am Marko `NarsuMan` Rintam... more...
Comments: 3 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:49

Case study - Improving performance of TWIKI using Glassfish/LRWPinJava

2008-09-29 - 21:06 by NagendraNagarajayya in General
A case study that shows improving the performance of TWIKI has been published on the https://lrwpinjava.dev.java.net/ LRWPinJava website. Glassfish/LRWPinJava improves TWIKI performance more than 2x with 10x less load compared to Apache 1.3/cgi bin on Solaris 10 and T2000, a Sun/SPARC CMT based system. is a J2EE open source Application Server while LRWPinJava is an open source implementation of the http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/WebServices/javaC LRWP/lrwp.html LRWP protocol... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:54

TWiki Application Report - Holiday Planner

2008-08-17 - 12:57 by StefanAlthoefer in Usability
My group in our company had the same problem as all groups: How to coordinate annual holiday for the group members? Recently we used the wall calendar in my office to remember each members holiday plan. After plans had changed, it looked odd. And it worked only inside my office. As we already use TWiki for project management and knowledge base, I looked for a Wiki based solution. I browsed through the rich TWiki plugin area, but nothing fulfilled my wishes. Especially no plugin was able to show... more...
Comments: 3 - latest comment by SeanCMorgan - 2008-08-19 - 15:13

TWiki 4.2.2 fast patch release out now.

2008-08-10 - 15:18 by SvenDowideit in General
I just built and released a patch release TWiki 4.2.2 that fixes the following issues found by users: Registration with verification fails in 4.2.1 REVINFO with web specified in topic param renders as though topic does not exist. TWiki::Compatibility has undefined variable error A number of other small issues were resolved, including updating the release process. I Hope this will be the begining of a tradition of creating patch releases as soon as fixes are available. Please go ahead... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by MartinSeibert - 2008-08-10 - 15:24

TWiki in The Conversation Prism

2008-08-06 - 04:23 by VickiBrown in General
In his article, Introducing The Conversation Prism, Brian Solis writes: Over the last month, I worked with Jesse Thomas of JESS3, to create a new graphic that helps chart online conversations between the people that populate communities as well as the networks that connect the Social Web. The Conversation Prism is free to use and share. It`s our contribution to a new era of media education and literacy. The conversation map is a living, breathing representation of Social Media and will evolve as... more...

Release Managers comments on TWiki 4.2.1

2008-08-04 - 22:29 by KennethLavrsen in Development
Here is the release manager`s (KennethLavrsen) reflection on TWiki 4.2.1 As release manager for TWiki for almost 3 years I have been managing the releases of quite many TWiki versions now. But the release 4.2.1 is probably the release I have put more heart and energy into and also the release I have felt most pleased with getting finished and made available for our many users. TWiki release 4.2.0 was a significant release feature wise. It introduced a fantastic new Wysiwyg editor. It introduced the... more...

More stability for TWiki 4.2 - Over 150 bugs fixed

2008-08-04 - 20:52 by MartinSeibert in Development
The TWiki community has just released a big patch release for the newest TWiki version 4.2. In the new release, that can be found at https://twiki.org/cgi bin/view/Codev/TWikiRelease04x02x01 both stability and performance have improved . One main focus was to improve the reliability of the WYSIWYG editor : `We have made big improvements with this feature that brings TWiki one more step closer to the community of non tech savvy people.` says Kenneth Lavrsen (Motorola), who is in charge of release... more...

Moldy Oldies

2008-07-22 - 22:45 by VickiBrown in Usability
How can you determine if old content is `moldy` (stale) or simply doesn`t need to be changed regularly? TWiki is terrific. Anyone can add pages. However, if you don`t have a dedicated TWiki librarian, content can become stale. I wanted a relatively easy way to mark `old` pages and ask for feedback: is this content still useful? I installed a custom view template and combined that with a comment form. Pages older than a pre defined date now appear with an extra block of text at the top: Screenshot... more...
Comments: 4 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:38

Building a Twitter Reader With pyTwerp and TWiki

2008-07-08 - 02:10 by VickiBrown in General
One of the features of Twitter is that it runs 24/7/365. (Un)fortunately, I don`t. So, I miss things. I especially miss tweets from people in the `other` hemispheres! I didn`t want to miss things, so I looked for a solution. Being a programmer myself, I wanted a solution I could control and tweak if necessary. However, I didn`t want to write something from scratch if I didn`t have to! Twitter has a popular, published API, so I figured someone would have written what I wanted. Someone did. I found... more...

Sorting Lists in TWiki

2008-07-06 - 18:05 by VickiBrown in Usability
Where I work, we have started a page for `new people` in the department. People are added to the page as they join the group. Each person has a section for mini bio and other information and there is a table of contents. The problem: as the page gets larger, it`s more difficult to find the entry for a given person. The TOC is ordered by when the person joined. It would be convenient to be able to sort the TOC alphabetically (it`s just a list after all) I started looking for ways to sort a list in... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-04-08 - 06:59

Bits and Pieces

2008-07-06 - 06:07 by VickiBrown in General
Working with TWiki doesn`t need to be big and showy to learn something from it. I did lots of TWiki work last week. 1. I redid our Breadcrumbs in our home TWiki. The default for a subweb is something like CFCL TWiki Projects/Arti WebHome now (using BreadCrumbsPlugin) we have CFCL TWiki Projects Arti WebHome The vs is an artifact but Rich kinda liked it so I`ll keep it. 2. I put our TopicTree code into our Shared topics so it`s standardized. I also added a subwebs... more...

Universal Wiki Edit Button for TWiki

2008-06-20 - 14:44 by SvenDowideit in Usability
There has been progress towards making the Web properly Read Write at Universal Edit Button site. TWiki.org and Bugs site have been Universal Edit Button enabled all you need to do is install the addin, and you see a Wiki Edit Icon in the Firefox URL input box. Editing then becomes as simple as clicking on the icon in the toolbar! I have checked in the template changes needed to the twiki 4.2.1 branch, but if you`re impatient to see it working for your TWiki apply the patch attached to this Blog... more...
Comments: 3 - latest comment by MichaelDaum - 2008-06-23 - 06:48

New Employee Application

2008-06-13 - 19:57 by DavidWolfe in General
In our company with several geographically dispersed teams, we found it challenging to keep up with who our coworkers are in other offices. Another challenge was that when a new person was hired, that information often did not reach the people who needed it in order to prepare for the new employee`s arrival. There are preparations to be made, such as having their computer configured, having benefits and other company information packets ready for them, and having basic orientation or training ready... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by SvenDowideit - 2008-06-13 - 23:58

Parameterized Includes

2008-06-08 - 23:07 by RichMorin in Usability
I have recently been creating a number of TWiki pages that contain multiple variations on very similar code; e.g., many twisties like this one: where the only difference is the showlink/hidelink text. As a programmer, I don`t like to repeat code. I prefer to write a function, use a macro, or set a variable. (Repeat Yourself). I asked the TWiki Community for suggestions in GenericMacroProcessing and Peter Thoeny suggested ParameterizedIncludes. Parameterized Includes are just the thing! I`ve defined... more...

TWiki presented at LSM / RMLL 2008, 3rd of July

2008-06-03 - 20:24 by OlivierBerger in General
TWiki will be presented at Libre Software Meeting / Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre 2008 in Mont de Marsan (France) on 3rd of July. TWiki is used by Espace Mend... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by MartinSeibert - 2008-06-07 - 20:50

TWiki Twitters

2008-05-22 - 02:56 by VickiBrown in General
Perhaps you`ve heard of Twitter, the microblogging service that lets you stay in touch with friends, old and new, by web, IM, or SMS. Twitter lets you tell others what you`re doing in 140 character chunks. Recently, TWiki has joined the Twitter crowd. If you`re not quite ready to write a full blog entry you might still have thoughts and comments to share about TWiki. What are you using TWiki for? Have you recently solved a problem? Why not use Twitter? We have two Twitter users: @twikiorg and... more...

TWiki - It's In Your Closet

2008-05-20 - 14:36 by VickiBrown in General
Show the world `It`s in TWiki`. Wear a TWiki t shirt! Choose your style. Available in the Shop. Read more about what the community is doing about making merchandise available at TWikiMerchandise. more...

Wikis are the glue holding Intranets together

2008-04-24 - 13:20 by Martin Seibert in General
As a knowledge management system and employee portal, a Wiki is of incalculable value within the company network, fueling the Intranet motor. In an Intranet, standard functions and killer applications are effective Standard functions include, for example, employee search, forums, and document management. In addition to these, so called killer applications are spurring on the Intranet. The term was coined by Jakob Nielsen and describes applications that keep the Intranet running and necessary. These... more...

Join the Silicon Valley TWiki User Meet-up 16 May 2008

2008-04-22 - 18:59 by PeterThoeny in General
The upcoming quarterly Silicon Valley TWiki User Meet up is scheduled for Fri, 16 May 2008 05:30 PM. Please reserve the date and RSVP at TWikiMeetUpInSiliconValley. This will be our third event where you can mingle with fellow TWiki users, share fun/useful stuff you have done with TWiki, and exchange best practices. Please spread the word! NET is organizing the event and is sponsoring food and drink. We are currently looking for a venue at a Silicon Valley company that is using TWiki. Please watch... more...

Next Friday: TWiki meetup in Delft, Holland

2008-04-22 - 08:39 by KoenMartens in General
Next Friday afternoon will be the second TWiki meetup in Holland. We will be guests at the technical university in Delft, at the department of policy and management. If you haven`t already, indicate your presence on the RSVP list. Where the first meetup proved to be very short with just 2 hours, this second meetup will have the possibility to run longer, with lots of room for discussion and knowledge exchange. We will kick off with a general overview of the state of TWiki: what is the community working... more...

Toronto Wiki Tuesdays: Using Wikis to Debate

2008-04-07 - 19:59 by MartinCleaver in General
As part of the 2008 Wiki Tuesdays Guest Speaker Series, Adrian Fritsch (Software Consultant and founder of debatum.org) will lead discussions at Toronto Wiki Tuesday at Epicure Cafe. This is a cross posting. Here`s Adrian`s event description: What: Toronto Wiki Tuesdays: using Wikis to Debate The problem To form a well reasoned opinion, you need the best arguments on different sides of a debate. Wikipedia stresses neutral point of view and so make it`s content hard to contrast with your current... more...

Scalability of TWiki

2008-03-26 - 06:24 by PeterThoeny in General
Sometimes we get the question on how well TWiki can scale. This blog post compiles scalability related information so that you can plan your TWiki deployment effectively. Scaling Across Teams and Departments TWiki was designed as an enterprise wiki from its inception. You find features specifically designed to support large deployments. Other wiki engines have a different focus and may lack some of these features. Wikis typically flourish in grassroots. Once at the radar screen of the CTO/CIO, grassroots... more...
Comments: 4 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2008-04-03 - 05:18

Why there should be a Wiki integrated into every Intranet

2008-03-17 - 12:18 by Martin Seibert in General
Within an Intranet, Wikis are a good means for the quick and uncomplicated collecting of information that is needed for the long term; this creates a base of knowledge as well as a platform for communication that is always available to the participating employees. The following Top Ten reasons are arguments for why every Intranet should have its own Wiki. 1. Slowing of the e mail flood It is true that e mail inboxes function as extensive knowledge storage areas, but they often go unused; in addition... more...

Branch development with SVK

2008-03-11 - 20:30 by GilmarSantosJr in Development
Sometime ago I started TWikiStandAlone project and one of the first problems I faced was `which code base should I use?` Since I would create a branch, I thought about to use 4.1.2, the last stable release at that time, but this approach had some problems: Some changes I needed was already performed at MAIN branch, but not at 4.1.2 When finished, it would be difficult to merge with MAIN On the other hand, if I had created a branch from MAIN, how could I keep it in sync? How could I merge... more...

TWiki Standalone: What is it about?

2008-03-11 - 15:28 by GilmarSantosJr in General
I already wrote a post about TWikiStandAlone project, but after I read the minutes from GeorgetownReleaseMeeting2008x03x03, I realized many people could be thinking `Cool, but what is the benefit for me?` . So I`ll try to answer this question. wink The standard way to run TWiki is as a CGI script. It`s easy to setup and many web servers and hosting services support it. But it`s also slow and resource hungry. There are some hacks and discussions about using things like ModPerl and PersistentPerl (aka... more...

TWiki using IIS and Windows Authentication

2008-03-06 - 15:57 by PhilipSweetenham in General
My use for TWiki is for an installation, on an intranet, where users don`t have to re enter their passwords (or worse still have yet another to remember). I now have a few months` experience of running TWiki using Microsoft`s IIS to handle all issues of user authentication. For brief notes on the installation steps used, please see: Installing TWiki on Windows, using IIS and Cygwin. more...

Requesting customer feedback on removing RCS files in subdirectories feature

2008-03-04 - 07:05 by KennethLavrsen in General
The TWiki development team asks for customer feedback for the following proposal. TWiki has a documented feature that allows the admin to setup TWiki at installation so that the revision control file (the files that ends with ,v) are placed in subdirectories. We have received the first and only bug report that says it does not work. The reason for the feature was to allow twice the number of topics in a web but we are not sure any longer that the feature really gives the needed performance boost... more...

Meeting like-minded TWiki-adepts

2008-03-02 - 17:08 by KoenMartens in General
More and more, TWiki enthousiasts around the globe are getting together to share experiences and talk about TWiki and how it is being used. These meetups are a great way to see what TWiki is capable of. Among the more succesful series are the Silicon Valley meetups, which have been blogged about on this same blog a number of times. In april, the second Dutch TWiki meetup will take place. The first meet up was a success, although a bit short. It turns out we have enough to talk about to warrant a... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by CarloSchulz - 2008-03-26 - 18:13

TWiki, YouTube and $2,000

2008-02-28 - 15:48 by MichaelCorbett in General
TWiki is one of the most powerful application wikis around and, with over 2 million users, it is also one of the most widely used. The trouble is, the mainstream media haven`t picked this up yet and so TWiki remains one of the internet`s best kept secrets. YouTube, on the other hand, is in a completely different place. It is the number 2 site on the internet and over 100 million videos get watched every day. Many companies use its high profile to promote their own products and services. We could... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by MartinSeibert - 2008-03-14 - 09:40

Second Silicon Valley User Meetup

2008-02-17 - 18:42 by VickiBrown in General
The February Community Summit meeting was followed, on Friday night, by an open TWiki User Meetup. Approximately 35 TWiki users and interested parties convened to eat pizza and learn more about TWiki. Five people gave short presentations, either of sites they`ve implemented in TWiki, projects they would like to see implemented, or nifty TWiki capabilities There was time before and after the presentations for networking and general discussion. Presentations Kenneth Lavrsen Motorola site demo... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2008-02-21 - 05:57

Community Summit - Sunnyvale, CA Feb. 2008

2008-02-17 - 18:29 by VickiBrown in General
On Thursday and Friday, Feb 14/15, I attended the TWiki Community Summit in Sunnyvale, CA. The location and and wireless internet access for the meeting were provided by Yahoo!. The Summit meetings were followed, on Friday night, by an open TWiki User Meetup. 14 people attended at least part of the Sunnyvale Summit, either in person or via conference call and IRC. It was clearly noted that the purpose of the Summit is to brainstorm ideas and strategy, not to make any `final` decisions. The agenda... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2008-02-21 - 05:56

TWiki Meet Up - Silicon Valley - November 29, 2007

2007-12-17 - 19:53 by AmirShobeiri in General
We had a wonderful first Silicon Valley TWiki User`s Meet Up at Plug and Play Tech Center Thursday night (Nov 29). More than 50 TWiki users were in attendance and highlights from the evening included a superb presentation by Vicki Brown of Yahoo! and Guy Martin of Motorola Open System Technology, among others. Vicki Brown explained how Yahoo!`s TWiki site had grown to incredible richness with 318,000 live pages, more than 10,000 users, 5 MILLION page views per month and more than 500,000 TWiki page... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2013-11-20 - 19:27

Does TWiki need a Foundation?

2007-12-16 - 14:47 by KoenMartens in General
Sparked by the emergence of NET, a new commercial entity delivering enterprise class TWiki services, the debate of a TWiki Foundation has been reopened. NET has TWiki founder Peter Thoeny. Another player in the field of commercial TWiki services that already existed is WikiRing, a brand/partnership founded by some of the most active and long term contributors to TWiki. This begs the question: is TWiki.org able to hold its own as an independent project? If we want to guarantee that the answer to this... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2007-12-18 - 18:11

Plugins And TWiki 4.2.0

2007-12-10 - 22:11 by KennethLavrsen in Development
The release 4.2.0 is closer than ever. With the RC2 and the very short list of release blockers of which most are documentation and confirmation of fixes things are starting to look very good and a release is very close. TWiki has an impressive number of Plugins. Many are now outdated because a better plugin has been made or the core code has adopted the function. But there are at least 100 maybe close to 200 that will be relevant to many. The TWiki plugin repository is one of the major strengths... more...

How to REST

2007-11-14 - 10:37 by CrawfordCurrie in Development
A Long, Long Time Ago RafaelAlvarez 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... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2007-11-14 - 18:46

TWiki Stand Alone Project: Do You Want Flexibility?

2007-10-26 - 20:33 by GilmarSantosJr in Development
I`m a undergraduate computer science student from University of Bahia and I worked with TWiki administration at Science Department and at Brasil. I like TWiki a lot, but I`m a little frustrated with its performance and resource consumption. Many times I had to kill apache (sometimes I had also to reboot server) cause of `out of memory` errors. I started to test alternatives, such as SpeedyCGI and ModPerl. I tried also FastCGI but I didn`t get it to work. Performance raise with ModPerl is fantastic... more...
Comments: 3 - latest comment by MichaelDaum - 2007-11-14 - 09:19

Status of 4.2.0 from the release manager

2007-10-13 - 10:55 by KennethLavrsen in General
Some observations from your release manager. Quality We have 19 urgent bugs open. We have 86 normal bugs open We are not able to release a release candidate yet. Next will be a beta 3 The hall of fame currently says that the top 5 bug fixers since 4.1.2 are Crawford Currie 150 Arthur Clemens 56 Sven Dowideit 49 Kenneth Lavrsen 42 Steffen Poulsen 12 We need more giving a hand getting the bugs fixed. Or at least help analysing the bug and point... more...

Two TWiki Applications under my belt, Going for the Third

2007-10-13 - 02:29 by NeilRG in General
I`m a systems administrator and programmer at a non for profit working closely with civilian agencies in the US. The organization as a whole is interested in Wikis. I have been able to successfully champion wikis (specifically TWiki) within my own division and among the people I work with. The first successful TWiki deployment was a large survey application for a government agency. We were able to mold the site using skins and templates into a sleek interface. Auto generated index pages provided... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by PeterThoeny - 2007-10-16 - 21:10

Case Study: KQED's QUEST Program Managed by TWiki

2007-10-05 - 06:02 by PeterThoeny in General
Last night I went to the Wednesdays` October event in San Francisco. KQED, the Public Radio/TV for Northern California, gave a presention on how they use TWiki in a structured way to manage the program. `QUEST is a TV, radio, web, and education series by KQED that explores science, environment and nature in Northern California.` The program runs for 3 years and will produce 60 TV features and 48 radio features per year, as well as daily blogs and http://www.flickr.com/search/?q kqedquest photo... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by CarloSchulz - 2007-10-05 - 09:14

set expiry and ETags to improve your TWiki performance

2007-09-27 - 12:37 by SvenDowideit in General
TWiki uses alot of static files, and util we implement the magic js and css minify we`ve been talking about for a while, you can reduce the load on your apache server, and increase the aparent speed of your user`s experience, by setting the Expires HTTP header for static files to `quite large`. Because TWiki.org has an obvious cyclic usage profile view mrtg graph, and because we`re likely to upgrade the server to 4.2.0 in the comming months, I`ve settled on ExpiresDefault `access plus 11 days... more...
Comments: 1 - latest comment by RichardDonkin - 2007-09-29 - 10:36

TWikiRelease04x02 branched, and Beta 1 released

2007-09-20 - 01:27 by SvenDowideit in Development
Release 4.2.0 Beta 1: zip tgz installer We have begun the count down to a new TWiki Release. For people wanting to help test the releases, there are nightly builds uploaded to nightly build area. As things stablize, I will then build a beta release, and upload it to TWiki.org. Please , report any bugs you notice, even ones you can`t quite reproduce to TWiki bugs system and mark as Urgent. These bugs will then be worked on, or downgraded as appropriate to this release. We are also collecting bug... more...

TWiki Usability Tricks Pt1: Turn your index into a sitemap

2007-09-12 - 16:09 by CarloSchulz in Usability
If you are scanning one of the current indexes (WebTopicList and WebIndex) for a specific topic you have no idea which other topics are related e.g. which topics are child topics. With the help of TreePlugin you can easily turn your index into a sitemap. As you can see in the screenshot all topics are displayed by hierarchy and alphabet. How To: The top level topic in this example is the WebHome (renamed in this example). Therefore the WebHome needs to be the root of all topics in... more...
Comments: 7 - latest comment by SeanCMorgan - 2008-08-27 - 16:24

Block-level 'IF' is quite easy, really

2007-09-01 - 10:18 by CrawfordCurrie in Development
As an experiment, more to see if it was possible or not, I just extended %SECTION to support an `if` type and an ELSE clause. This lets you write something like this: FLUB is defined FLUB is not defined Fun, eh? The syntax is rather clumsy, but it shows how easy it is to add something like this. It`s basically what the IfDefinedPlugin does, if I`m not much mistaken, but with syntax consistent with the rest of the core. The syntax is evaluated after verbatim and literal sections are protected... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by CrawfordCurrie - 2007-09-17 - 20:20

WYSIWYG nitty gritty

2007-08-27 - 22:42 by CrawfordCurrie in Development
In last night`s TWiki release meeting I was asked for some detail on some of the design decisions I made during the WYSIWYG development for TWiki. Rather than answer them piecemeal on IRC, I decided to write this topic. Ask any detailed questions in replies, and I`ll try and answer them. You never know, we might uncover a better approach! How `Javascript editors` work Modern browsers all have some way of editing HTML in the browser. That means there are some functions for handling mouse movements... more...
Comments: 2 - latest comment by CedricWeber - 2007-09-03 - 09:20

TWiki meetups

2007-08-25 - 09:09 by KoenMartens in General
The success of the TWikiCommunitySummitRome2007 inspired those present in having lots of local meet ups. Rome clearly showed how inspiring and helpful face to face meetings are. Besides, it is also fun to meet your fellow TWiki administrators, developers, contributors and users. A meetup can be anything, from an informal meeting in your local pub once every while to an organized event with renowned speakers. You, as a TWiki community member, make the meetings. So far, active interest has been expressed... more...

First TWiki community summit yields positive results

2007-08-20 - 20:56 by KoenMartens in General
On august 15th 16th the first ever TWiki community summit was held in Rome. The event was sponsered by NET, the recently introduced provider of a commercial, certified TWiki distribution. The summit was attended by 12 people, among which a large number of long time contributors. All attendants left the meeting with a very positive feeling, which is not surprising given the constructive dialogues and important decisions made. One of those decisions, of which this article is the first result, is... more...

See also: Download TWiki, What is TWiki, Public TWiki Sites, TWiki screenshots, Social Media and Structured Wikis at Work - Enterprise Collaboration for Millennials, Getting Involved, TWiki Consultants


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