This is where announcements of new releases, features, and other news are posted. IkiWikiUsers are recommended to subscribe to this page's RSS feed.

Quick poll: Do you feel that ikiwiki is fast enough on this server, or should I move it to my much beefier auxiliary server?

[[!poll open=no 40 "It's fast enough" 6 "It's too slow!" 4 "No opinion"]]

If you have specifics on performance issues, you might mention them on the discussion page.

The current server is a single processor 2.8 ghz Sepron machine shared among 4 other xen instances, and often heavily loaded by extraneous stuff like spamassassin and compiles. The auxiliary server is a dual processor, dual core 2 ghz Opteron shared with other xen instances (exact number not available from provider), but with little other load.

Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

News for ikiwiki 2.52:

All wikis need to be rebuilt on upgrade to this version. If you listed your wiki in /etc/ikiwiki/wikilist this will be done automatically when the Debian package is upgraded. Or use ikiwiki-mass-rebuild to force a rebuild.

ikiwiki 2.52 released with these changes

  • attachment: New plugin for uploading and managing attachments. This includes a fairly powerful PageSpec based admin pref for deciding whether to accept a given upload, and an attachment management interface on the edit page. (Sponsored by The TOVA Company.)
  • If attachments are not enabled, configure CGI.pm to disable file uploads by default. (An anti-DOS measure.)
  • toggle: Add support for toggles that are open by default.
  • toggle: Fix to work in preview mode.
  • toggle: Add javascript to top of page, not to end. This avoids flicker since closed toggles will not be displayed as the page is loading.
  • The editpage form now uses the raw page name, not the page title, in its 'page' cgi parameter. Using the title was ambiguous and made it impossible to tell between some pages, like "foo/bar" and "foo__47__bar", sometimes causing the wrong page to be edited.
  • This change means that some edit links need to be updated. Force a rebuild on upgrade to this version.
  • Above change also allowed really fixing escaped slashes from the blogpost form.
Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

ikiwiki.info has upgraded to the not yet released ikiwiki 2.30. This version of ikiwiki drops support for subscribing to commit mail notifications for pages. The idea is that you can subscribe to the new RecentChanges feed instead. (Or create your own custom feed of only the changes you're interested in, and subscribe to that.)

So if you were subscribed to mail notifications on here, you'll need to change how you keep track of changes. Please let me know if there are any missing features in the RecentChanges feeds.

Statically building the RecentChanges also has performance implications, I'll keep an eye on server speed..

--Joey

Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008
Ikiwiki has its own domain now, ikiwiki.info. Update your links.
Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

I was asked a good question today: How can a company find someone to work on ikiwiki? To help answer this question, I've set up a consultants page. If you might be interested in being paid to work on ikiwiki, please add your information to the page. --Joey

And here's the first company looking for an ikiwiki developer that I am aware of:

The TOVA Company, a small medical software and hardware company in Portland, Oregon, is looking for developers to add functionality to ikiwiki. We're looking for developers who are already familiar with ikiwiki development, including plugins, and who would be willing to work on a part-time, non-employee, project-based basis for each of the small features that we want. The features we're interested in would obviously be GPL'd, and released to the community (if they'll have them :) ). Please contact Andrew Greenberg (andrew@thetovacompany) if you're interested. Thanks!

Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

I've started using git as ikiwiki's main repository. See download for repository locations.

Note that all the sha1sums have changed from those in previously published git repositories. Blame git-svnimport.

I hope that this will make it easier to maintain and submit patches for ikiwiki.

--Joey

Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

Ikiwiki now has an IRC channel: #ikiwiki on irc.oftc.net

The channel features live commit messages for CIA for changes to both ikiwiki's code and this wiki. Plus occasional talk about ikiwiki.

Thanks to JoshTriplett for making this happen.

Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

Ikiwiki has reached version 2.0 and entered a new phase in its development cycle.

With the 2.0 release of ikiwiki, some major changes have been made to the default configuration:

  • The usedirs setting is enabled by default. This will break all URLs to wikis that did not have usedirs turned on before, unless you follow the procedure described at switching to usedirs or edit your setup file to turn usedirs off: usedirs => 0,
  • OpenID logins are now enabled by default, if the Net::OpenID::Consumer perl module is available. Password logins are also still enabled by default. If you like, you can turn either OpenID or password logins off via the disable_plugins setting.

An overview of changes in the year since the 1.0 release:

  • New improved URLs to pages via usedirs.
  • OpenID support, enabled by default.
  • Plugin interface added, with some 60 plugins available, greatly expanding the capabilities of ikiwiki.
  • Tags, atom feeds, and generally full-fledged blogging support.
  • Fully working utf8.
  • Optimisations, approximately 3.5 times as fast as version 1.0.
  • Improved scalability to large numbers of pages.
  • Improved scalable logo.
  • Support for additional revision control systems besides svn: git, tla, mercurial.
  • Some support for other markup languages than markdown: rst, textile.
  • Unit test suite, with more than 300 tests.
Posted Mon Apr 30 00:51:57 2007

Google has accepted ikiwiki as a mentoring organization for Summer of Code 2007.

See our Summer of Code page for projects.

--JoshTriplett

Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008
cia

Commits to ikiwiki's source code are now fed into CIA, and can be browsed, subscribed to etc on its project page. Note that changes to the documentation wiki are currently excluded.

Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

I've put together a short screencast that covers approximatly the first half of the setup document, and includes a demo of setting up a blog using ikiwiki.

http://kitenet.net/~joey/screencasts/ikiwiki_blog/

.. And now I've added a second screencast. Note that this uses a script that is only available in the as yet unreleased ikiwiki version 2.15.

http://kitenet.net/~joey/screencasts/ikiwiki_cgi_and_git/

--Joey

Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

I've produced a code_swarm visualization of the first 2+ years of ikiwiki's commit history.

[[!img Error: Can't locate Locale/gettext.pm in @INC (@INC contains: . blib/lib /usr/lib/perl5/5.10.0/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.10.0 /usr/local/lib/perl5/siteperl/5.10.0/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/local/lib/perl5/siteperl/5.10.0 /usr/lib/perl5/vendorperl/5.10.0/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendorperl/5.10.0 /usr/lib/perl5/vendorperl /usr/lib/perl5/siteperl/5.10.0 .) at (eval 588) line 2. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 588) line 2. ]]

PS, while I'm posting links to videos, here's a video of a lightning talk about ikiwiki.

--Joey

notes

Interesting things to watch for:

  • Initial development of ikiwiki to the point it was getting web edits. (First 2 seconds of video!)
  • Introduction to plugin support, and later, plugin changes dominating code changes.
  • Introduction of openid support and the resulting swarm of openid commenters.
  • Switch to git, my name in the logs changes from "joey" to "Joey Hess", and there are more code commits directly from others.

Getting the commit log was tricky because every web commit is in there too, so it has to deal with things like IPs and openids. The code swarm log.pl script will munge the log to handle these, and it was configured with code swarm.config.

Video editing by kino, ffmpeg, ffmpeg2theora, and too many hours of pain.

Audio by the Punch Brothers.

Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

Ikiwiki in svn now has support for using OpenID, a decentralized authentication mechanism that allows you to have one login that you can use on a growing number of websites.

Traditional password-based logins are still supported, but I'm considering switching at least ikiwiki.info over to using only OpenID logins. That would mean blowing away all the currently registered users and their preferences. If you're active on this wiki, I suggest you log out and log back in, try out the OpenID signup process if you don't already have an OpenID, and see how OpenID works for you. And let me know your feelings about making such a switch. --Joey

[[!poll 59 "Accept only OpenID for logins" 18 "Accept only password logins" 35 "Accept both"]]

Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008
Integrated issue tracking with Ikiwiki by Joey Hess is now available on LinuxWorld.com. (LinuxWorld's author contract also allows this article to become part of the project's documentation.) Learn how to use Ikiwiki inlining and PageSpecs for lightweight workflow. Joey also explains how having the BTS and docs in the project's revision control system can help users of distributed revision control systems keep bug tracking info in sync with code changes.
Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

ikiwiki 2.53 released with these changes

  • search: generate configuration files once only when rebuilding (Gabriel McManus)
  • attachment: Fix an uninitialised value warning when editing a page that currently has no attachments.
  • Fix a bug with links to pages whose names contained colons.
  • attachment: Support old versions of CGI.pm that lack an upload method.
  • Include ikiwiki.setup in examples in the debian package.
  • attachment: Support perl 5.8's buggy version of CGI.pm.
  • otl: Support utf-8 files. (Recai Oktaş)
Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008
After looking up and noticing that another 8 hours had passed, replying to people and hacking, I've added a TipJar page, in case anyone feels like tossing me a few bucks for ikiwiki. TIA! --Joey
Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

I've gone ahead and moved ikiwiki.info to the faster box mentioned on server speed. Most poll respondants felt the old box was fast enough, but it's getting a bit overloaded with other stuff.

If you can see this, you're seeing the new server. If not, your DNS server hasn't caught up yet. I'll keep the old server up for a while too and merge any changes across since git makes that bog-easy.

Please report any problems..

Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

ikiwiki 2.51 released with these changes

  • Improve toplevel parentlink to link directly to index.html when usedirs is disabled.
  • map: Add a "show" parameter. "show=title" can be used to display page titles, rather than the default page name. Based on a patch from Jaldhar H. Vyas, Closes: #484510
  • hnb: New plugin, contributed by Axel Beckert.
  • meta: Store "description" in pagestate for use by other plugins.
  • map: Support show=description.
  • textile: The Text::Textile perl module has some regexps that fail if input is flagged as utf-8, but contains invalid characters such as 0x92. To prevent it from crashing, re-encode the content before calling it, which will ensure that it's really utf-8.
  • Version the suggests of xapian-omega to a version known to be new enough to work with ikiwiki. Reportedly, version 0.9.9 is too old to work. Closes: #486592
  • creole: New plugin from Bernd Zeimetz. Closes: #486930
  • aggregate: Add template parameter.
  • Add support for the universal edit button <http://universaleditbutton.org/> (To get this on all pages of an exiting wiki, rebuild the wiki.)
  • txt: New plugin, contributed by Gabriel McManus.
  • smiley: Generate links relative to the destpage. (Fixes a reversion from 2.41.)
  • toc: Revert change in 2.45 that made it run at sanitize time. That broke use of toc in a sidebar.
  • Call format hooks when generating page previews, thus fixing toc display there, as well as fixing inlins to again display in page previews, since it's started using format hooks. This also allows several other things, like embed, that use format hooks, to work during page preview time.
  • Format hooks should not rely on getting an entire html document, as they will only get the body during page preview.
  • toggle: Deal with preview mode when adding javascript.
Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

ikiwiki 2.54 released with these changes

  • [ Joey Hess ]
    • Make it possible to load setup files w/o running them. Code needing to do so can call IkiWiki::Setup::load, which will return a hash of values.
  • [ Josh Triplett ]
    • ikiwiki-transition: Fix command-line processing so the prefix_directives transition works again.
  • [ Joey Hess ]
    • template: Add support for a BASENAME variable.
    • Fixes creation of pages when clicking on WikiLinks starting with "/".
    • Change deb dependencies to list Text::Markdown before markdown, since the former, while slower, has a much better html parser that avoids numerous bugs.
    • Move yesno function out of inline and into IkiWiki core, not exported.
    • Error handling improvement for preprocess hooks. It's now safe to call error() from such hooks; it will cause a nicely formatted error message to be inserted into the page.
    • Cut the size of the binary package in half by excluding pages for bugs and todo items from the html shipped in it.
    • parentlinks: New plugin, split out of ikiwiki core and enabled by default, and several new fields added to allow for advanced styling. (intrigeri)
    • smileys: Some fixes for escaped smileys.
    • smileys: Note that smileys need to be double-escaped for the escaping to work. Markdown removes one level of escaping.
    • Add a postscan hook.
    • search: Use postscan hook, avoid updating index when previewing.
    • git: Put web committer name/openid/address in the git author field. The committer's email address is not used (because leaking email addresses is not liked by many users). Closes: #451023
    • git: Fix parsing of git logs with no commit messages at all.
    • search: Fixes for title stemming, and use better term for tags. (Gabriel McManus) (Rebuilding the wiki on upgrade to this version is recommended if you use the search plugin.)
  • [ Simon McVittie ]
    • meta, inline: Support guid options, to allow forcing a particular url or uuid in feeds.
    • meta: fix title() PageSpec
    • Some footer style changes.
    • aggregate: Add an aggregateinternal option, which allows storing aggregated data to internal-use files, rather than wiki pages. This can save disk space, and be faster.
    • ikiwiki-transition: Add a aggregateinternal transition to rename the aggregated files.
Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

ikiwiki 2.55 released with these changes

  • remove: New plugin that adds the ability to remove pages via the web. (Sponsored by The TOVA Company.)
  • rename: New plugin that adds the ability to rename pages via the web. (Sponsored by The TOVA Company.) (This one's for you, Kyle.)
  • All rcs backends need to implement rcs_remove, rcs_commitstaged, and rcs_rename. (Done for svn, git).
  • This version adds renamepage hooks, which can be used to modify page content, including links, during renames.
  • prefix_directives enabled in doc wiki, all preprocessor directives converted. (Simon McVittie)
  • editpage: Don't show attachments link when attachments are disabled.
  • tag: Allow tagbase to be overridden by starting a tag with "./" or "/". (Simon McVittie)
  • Really fix bug with links to pages with names containing colons. Previous fix mised a few cases.
  • Avoid troublesome abs_path calls in wrapper setup.
  • Add allow_symlinks_before_srcdir config setting that can be used to avoid a security check that is a good safe default, but problimatic overkill in some situations.
  • Don't allow uploading an attachment with the same name as an existing page, to avoid confusion.
  • Split out error messages from editpage.tmpl into several separate templates.
  • attachment: Do not escape _ when determining attachment filenames.
  • Rebuild pages that change their type. (Gabriel McManus)
  • monotone: Add support for rename, delete, and also diff. (William Uther)
  • toggle: Fix incompatability between javascript and webkit.
  • bzr: Add support for rename and delete. (Jelmer Vernooij)
  • attachment: Use relative paths when inserting links.
  • toggle: Fix for when html got tidied. Closes: #492529 (Enrico Zini)
  • cutpaste: New plugin by Enrico Zini
Posted Thu Jul 31 18:43:37 2008

Some people may consider ikiwiki's default look to be a bit plain. Someone on slashdot even suggested perhaps it uses html 1.0. (Yes, an ikiwiki site has survived its first slashdotting. With static html, that's not very hard..) While the default style is indeed plain, there's more fine-tuning going on than you might think, and it's actually all done with xhtml and style sheets.

Stefano Zacchiroli came up with the idea of adding a css market page where IkiWikiUsers can share style sheets that you've come up with for ikiwiki. This is a great idea and I encourage those of you who have customised stylesheets to post them.

I'm also always looking for minimalistic yet refined additions to the default style sheet, and always appreciate suggestions for it.

--Joey

Posted Thu Jul 31 18:34:37 2008

By the way, some other pages with RSS feeds about ikiwiki include plugins, TODO and bugs.