Some News

1261428444|%e %B %Y
tags: cleaning-up news open-source projects

The fact, this site is inactive doesn't mean we don't work on open source release of Wikidot software. In fact almost every day I do some cleaning in code, that makes it less specific to wikidot.com and more universal. We run Wikidot.com software on several servers in different paths, with different operating systems (CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Mac OS X) and under different domains (both local and global). This software begins to be customizable again :-).

Recently I entirely removed the $GLOBALS['site'] variable from source, moved all Wikidot persistent files (beside database) to data/ directory (for easier backups and clarity), improved without-SSL configurations, worked hard on page saving internal API. In my free time I'm working on enabling INI configuration instead of old-bad conf/GlobalProperties.php which is hard to maintain.

We added HMAC-based hashing to saved passwords (instead of plain MD5, which might be simple to break for some silly passwords if one has database access), we do more things in background than before, we optimized user interface, fixed text label and enabled cross-site-includes which lets regular users share their wiki code snippets, just as they were included by other sites. It's been long time since we moved our closed software to Git, and this makes developing it pretty nice. We're using branches (many of them) and a nicely described process to organize work nicely without breaking to many things and thus to produce high quality code. Oh, and we use Wikidot daily. As our issue-tracker, blog engine, chat room, personal file space and more, more, more.

Pieter made Wikidot development more open, predictable and user-driven. He created at least the following successful projects at Wikidot (for Wikidot): http://blog.wikidot.com/, http://projects.wikidot.com/ and many templates of sites (or even full-blown applications) that are instantly-ready-to-use by simply cloning them. The central place for those templates is http://iron-giant.wikidot.com/.

Having all of this done and being done, we're all getting this project to a point where we can (once again) open its source to other people and let them fix (or at least find) bugs, improve code quality and performance, add features and contribute to our outstanding wiki service. This time, we would like to continue open-developing, in contrast to the last opening of the source, which was basically forking the closed sourced and not merging changes in open-source back to Wikidot.com.

Previous post: Big Progress

Comments

Add a New Comment
Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License