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

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 notification. You can specify to get notified immediately on every update of any page you watch, or get a digest notification of watchlist page changes once a day. With this feature, users are drawn back to the TWiki site, e.g. you increase the "stickiness" of the wiki. Simply point & click to watch and get notified - TWiki continues its focus on usability. The new WatchlistPlugin will be part of the upcoming TWiki Jerusalem release. The current MailerContrib operating on the WebNotify topics is deprecated and will be retired in an upcoming release. The new WatchlistPlugin is installed on TWiki.org. I invite you to watch and get notified of pages of interest, such as the dev pages of extensions you maintain. That way you can stay in the loop.

We have a new JiraPlugin, contributed by MahiroAndo - thank you Morgan Stanley for supporting the open source TWiki project! Atlassian's bugtracking system JIRA is used by many companies. The JiraPlugin allows users to add JQL (JIRA Query Language) statements in TWiki pages - the result is rendered as TWiki tables.

A new SapConnectPlugin contributed by RuedigerPlantiko of the Migros-Genossenschafts-Bund in Switzerland allows users to query content in an SAP system using the ABAP query language, and to show the result dynamically in TWiki pages. Thank you Migros for contributing this plugin! Migros is Switzerland's largest retailing company, its largest supermarket chain and largest employer. I started to learn Japanese at a Migros school.

We also got a new NotifyAuthorsPlugin to notify authors on a page on demand. I created this plugin on behalf of Wave Systems Corp. - thank you Wave for supporting the TWiki community! The plugin has two use cases. If a discussion is going on on a TWiki page you might want to invite everybody who participated so far to come back and contribute further. The plugin adds a "Notify Authors" button for that purpose. The second use case is status reporting. The person writing the status report might want to alert a list of people once the report is ready. Do you have use cases where this alert feature comes in handy?

In addition, these extensions have been enhanced in the last 4 weeks:

• ActionTrackerPlugin - adds support for action tags in topics, and automatic notification of action statuses
• BackupRestorePlugin - administrator utility to backup, restore and upgrade a TWiki site
• BlackListPlugin - utility to keep malicious users away from a public TWiki site
• ColorPickerPlugin - color picker for use in TWiki forms and TWiki applications
• DirectedGraphPlugin - draw a directed map of a web, part of a web, or of the structure around a single topic
• HeadlinesPlugin - show headline news in TWiki pages based on RSS and ATOM news feeds from external sites
• InterwikiPlugin - text ExternalSite:Page links to a page on an external site based on aliases defined in a rules topic
  
• JqPlotPlugin - add line, bar and pie charts to TWiki topics using jqPlot JavaScript library
• PublishWebPlugin - maintain a static website collaboratively in a TWiki web
• SpreadSheetPlugin - add spreadsheet calculation like "$SUM( $ABOVE() )" to TWiki tables or anywhere in topic text
• SyntaxHighlightingPlugin - highlight source code fragments for many languages
• TagMePlugin - tag wiki content collectively to find content by keywords
• TopMenuSkin - skin with pulldown menus in top bar
• TreeBrowserPlugin - renders a list as a collapsable/expandable tree
• TwistyPlugin - twisty section JavaScript library to open/close content dynamically
• TWikiGuestCacheAddOn - speed up a TWiki site by caching topics for non-authenticated users

What plugins do you depend on? I invite you to share your thoughts.

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