Recently, as a response to bug fixes or enhancement patches I have submitted to TWiki I was encouraged to sign up for SVN access and add the patches myself (the latest on MakeViewTopicActionsCustomizable by MartinCleaver and FilterFormFieldForIllegalCharacters by WillNorris). As this appears to be the preferred way of contributing to the TWiki community, may I humbly request such access.

Intro

My day job is Sr. Dir. of Software Engineering with Motorola Global Software Group; I (well, my team) am responsible that roughly 6000 engineers in our 14 globally distributed software centers have the environment that allows them to be productive, from processes and quality to IT and networking infrastructure.

A number of years ago, one of my teams proposed to use TWiki as a collaboration environment. We started a small experiment and it was very successful. I have been using TWiki since as a tool to collaborate between engineers geographically and time zone wise distributed all over the globe.

My interest in TWiki is in an application framework for developing and deploying collaborative tools (please see some of my rants on TWikiWhatWillYouBeWhenYouGrowUp). I support our TWiki installations as a hobby, as the deployment has not yet reached the level of having dedicated staff, albeit we have many of the above engineering population looking at some wiki topic on a daily basis. The number of people actively editing wiki topics is much smaller, however.

As some of you may know, due to lack of time, I have been running at Athens until recently. Over the last month or so, I moved our applications over to Cairo. In the course of this activity I have found and fixed a number of bugs (which explains the flurry of topic submissions on twiki.org from my end); I have also tried to capture some of our extensions as PluginPackages or AddOnPackages.

I am still somewhat confused on the best mode of contributing back to the community: ReadmeFirst seems to advocate the model of submit FeatureEnhancementRequests or BugReports, preferably with patches, and then wait until it gets into the TWiki release (or not). On the other hand, HowDoesTheDEVELOPBranchWork seems to favor a model of proactively making changes in the DevelopBranch, following the DeveloperResponsibilities. Clear guidance on what the preferred mode of contributing is would be greatly appreciated.

Either way, if you feel I could help best by directly putting patches onto the DevelopBranch, please provide access.

-- ThomasWeigert - 19 Feb 2005

P.S. Other than patches for bugs and feature enhancements, I have contributed ControlsPlugin, WorkFlowAddOn, FormsAddOn, and JSCalendarAddOn, and I have accepted maintenance of SectionalEditPlugin and SimpleTableEntryUsingForms.

P.P.S. I checked out the DevelopBranch, and noticed a bug in TWiki.WebLeftBarWebsList. The patch is below....

Index: data/TWiki/WebLeftBarWebsList.txt
===================================================================
--- data/TWiki/WebLeftBarWebsList.txt   (revision 3671)
+++ data/TWiki/WebLeftBarWebsList.txt   (working copy)
@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
-%WEBLIST{"<span style="background-color: %$markerVAR{\"WEBBGCOLOR\" web=$qname}
$marker%\">áá</span>á<b><a href=\"%SCRIPTURL%/view%SCRIPTSUFFIX%/$name/%HOMETOPI
C%\">$name</a></b><br/>"}%
-
+%WEBLIST{"<span style=\"background-color: %$markerVAR{\"WEBBGCOLOR\" web=$qname
}$marker%\">áá</span>á<b><a href=\"%SCRIPTURL%/view%SCRIPTSUFFIX%/$name/%HOMETOP
IC%\">$name</a></b><br/>"}%
+

-- ThomasWeigert - 19 Feb 2005

FWIW I support this request 101%. There is a legacy of topics that suggest the submission of patches and code changes, but the turnaround of such submissions is very very low. Direct submission to DevelopBranch (or even other scratch branches for zanier ideas) is the right way ahead.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 20 Feb 2005

Thomas, you are a very good fit for the team, I wholeheartedly support your request for check-in rights. You are an active contributor and you help move TWiki towards a better platform for TWikiApplications.

Our documentation is still kind of unorganized for the new development model. Anyone, please help fix that.

-- PeterThoeny - 22 Feb 2005

Thomas, welcome to the DEVELOP branch. Feel free to help shape its direction, not just fix its bugs

-- SvenDowideit - 27 Feb 2005