Foswiki 1.0 Released

Andrew Jones — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:51:12 +0000

Today Foswiki 1.0 has been released. Foswiki is an enterprise wiki and was started as a fork from TWiki back in October 2008^[1].

With the 1.0 release the software has been re-branded in order to remove any trademark violations that could potentially be sued by the TWiki trademark holders. There has also been a number of bug fixes (~120)^[2] from the version of TWiki that it was forked from (TWiki 4.2.3).

Foswiki 1.0 vs TWiki 4.2.4

The significant difference between Foswiki 1.0 and TWiki 4.2.4 is the branding. With TWiki being a trademarked name, the fork needed to rebrand the namespace of the code and many of the topics. For example, in TWiki all the documentation is stored in the TWiki web. This has had to be renamed to the System web.

Although there are no differences in main features between the two, Foswiki includes all the bug fixes from TWiki up to 4.2.4, plus the others that have been submitted by the Foswiki community. Therefore it could be said that Foswiki 1.0 is slightly more mature than TWiki 4.2.4.

Compatibility with TWiki

Nothing has changed in the way data is stored in Foswiki. Therefore webs and topics can easily be moved between the two software. However, as the namespace of the code has had to be re-branded, TWiki plugins are no longer compatible. This is why the TWikiCompatabilityPlugin has been written. It enables you to install any plugins available on TWiki.org on Foswiki (well, as long as they used the official plugins API). The other option is to port the TWiki plugins over to the Foswiki namespace.

On Foswiki.org you are able to download plugins that have been ported to the Foswiki namespace. There are also plugins available to download that are still in the TWiki namespace. This is because a lot of developers have been locked out of TWiki.org and so they can only contribute to the fork, but they still need to support their TWiki installs until the time is right for them to be upgraded. Therefore they are able to contribute upgraded versions of their extensions while keeping them compatible with TWiki.

Foswiki or TWiki?

If you are new to both these projects then I would recommend Foswiki. Having been subscribed to both mailing lists it is clear that there is much more activity in the Foswiki community and many more checkins to their Subversion repository^[3]. On the other hand there has been hardly any activity on the TWiki mailing lists, with many days the only emails sent out is the warning of unit test failures^[4].

If you are comming from TWiki and are wondering if you should move with the fork, then its a tough decision. While there is clearly more activity on Foswiki, at the end of the day both of these have the same features and a stable code base. So for the moment the best thing is probably to wait until Foswiki has had time to innovate and release some new features and/or extensions that TWiki does not have. If/when this happens then it may be time to move with the fork.

So what’s the future for TWiki? Well, it recently had its 10th birthday when project leader (and TWIKI.NET founder) Peter Theony promised a new release in January or February that will “advance TWiki as a web 2.0 player”^[5]. It will be interesting to see if they meet that release target and what new features it has. Who knows, perhaps he has something special up his sleeve that will bring back some developers and activity to the TWiki project? Only time will tell.

References

TWiki and the Fork

Andrew Jones — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:12:07 +0000

On the 27 October the TWiki community was split and a fork was started with the temporary name of NextWiki. Although I don’t know all the politics behind this, it seems there has been friction between the community and TWIKI.NET for a long time. There are many other blogs and news pages that summarises the fork and some are linked at the bottom of this post.

In my opinion I sympathise with the fork. It does seem that TWiki has become commercialised and TWIKI.NET want to use the project to create a product it can make money from. The ads all over twiki.org seem to confirm this. The statement from Tom Barton clearly defined what they want TWiki to be in the future, which many in the community did not agree on. This meant they needed to get rid of the community that wanted to go a different path in order to have it their own way.

So for now I have agreed to the Terms of Use at twiki.org so I can continue to maintain and support the plugins I have there. I also plan to move my plugins to the fork as soon as possible. I then hope to keep my plugins compatible with both for as long as practical. By then, it should be clear which project I want to support and this will get my full attention.

Update 18/11/08: The community decided name for the fork is Foswiki – Free and Open Source Wiki.

Andrew R. Jones » TWiki