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.

by Gabrys

Then I made the software extremely easy to install. It started with wdlite, which was not a success, because the software is not designed to work face-to-face with other applications sharing the same webserver, and wdlite tried to do that. Then I said, hey, why not run own webserver, but on some non-standard port. And I did it. Now I can run any number of Wikidots on my machine, each on its own port.

The making extremely easy to install finished with creating the *.deb package, that made installation as easy as 1 command, compared to 5 or 6 before. This can be both good and bad (if something goes wrong you won't know which part of the installation it is). Also the packaging I made is very bad. But it works from time to time. So this may save some people's time and this package can be used as a start for someone to create a really good Debian package.

The situation we're facing is we now have two products, which are:

• wikidot.com with nice features
• Wikidot.org with easy installation

We though we might migrate nice features from wikidot.com to Wikidot.org, but that seems impossible right now, because we have too many differences in code.

So we decided to go other way. Migrate features from Wikidot.org to .com, at least:

• forms,
• configuration with the INI file,
• running on custom-port,
• search phrase highligthing (if you come from google for example we'll highlight words you search for).

Then we'll replay the changes we made previously (when we created the open-source fork) to create the software unspecific and configurable again. We had a great change to test and do it the last time, so this time it's going to be much more smooth.

Then (and that's different from the previous situation) we'll apply the changes to the wikidot.com, so in fact we'll run the open source software to supply the wikidot.com service.

What does it mean?

• Current Wikidot.org development is frozen until we have the NEW version based on current wikidot.com software. (I'll accept fixes from you of course, but not fix bugs myself).
• Wikidot.org software will have all the great features that made wikidot.com much much better in the last year.
• Wikidot.org software will have all new features before they reach wikidot.com.
• You'll be able to actually see (and fix if you like) the software that runs wikidot.com.
• The developers (meaning mainly Michał and me) will be focused on one product not on two of them.

If you really really need some of the bugs to be fixed before we freeze the development on current version, please open a bug, and leave a comment on this post to tell us how much you need it to be done and why we should consider doing it.

Thanks for your patience.

by Gabrys

Today I managed to build the file, but the package is still far from being good. Anyway, I'm going to publish it, to reveal its badness.

I'm looking for someone to publish the package in their PPA at launchpad (or somewhere else).

Once we get more mature, we'll make separate packages for different things (PHP code, single-wiki-installation package and stuff) — i.e. do packages the "Debian way".

And all this is only for this:

aptitude install wikidot

(Not true right now, because we need a custom repository, but once we improve the package building, Wikidot may finally get into Debian repositories or at least Ubuntu's.)

by Gabrys

by Gabrys

• 2 — long awaited fixing of SearchAll module,
• 9 — some minor display issue on my account page,
• 10 — another issue on my account page (but this could be fixed after installing in Site Manager) and
• 16 — recently raised bug concerning missing pages.

Bugs 16 and 10 were easy to fix, because we have nice dump system I described before.

Fixing these is important because now I will work on developing forms for Wikidot. This means I won't put much attention into fixing small issues, while working on this big feature.

Also we want to make a first Wikidot release (with or without forms), so basically these fixes were more important than big new feature (that wouldn't be necessarily ready for the first release).

by Gabrys

• 0-schema.sql
• 1-users.sql
• 2-licenses.sql
• 3-themes.sql
• 4-main-site.sql
• 5-template-site.sql

The fact that they are split is a bit artificial, because they are all executed at once, but still it is nice to have 6 shorter files than one long. In case we want to add a new license to the initial dump, we don't need to search and be really careful to not break anything else. We just edit licenses file.

Even more important thing is removing pages from initial dump. As pages are quite a complex thing in Wikidot removing them from SQL dump decreases the size (and complexness) of it drastically. But we still need to populate the first wiki. And this is done with API methods and a nice directory structure:

• files/dump/sites
  • www
    • start.page
    • admin.manage.page
    • account.you.page
    • auth.login.page
  • template
    • start.page
    • admin.manage.page

Site is directory, page is a file in such a directory. A special script (that is called by make) browses the files/dump/sites directory and call page.save API method on each page, supplying the content of the file as the wiki source of the page to be saved. Such a one saving creates many database objects:

• page
• page_revision
• page_source
• page_metadata
• category (if does not exist yet)

So as you see, we benefit in two ways:

1. initial database dump is easier to understand and modify
2. adding pages to initial dump is much much easier

This still needs some polishing, but is a lot better than before.

by Gabrys

Also we wanted to make a comparison of Wikidot and other wiki engines, and we wanted to do it the wiki way, so we created a wiki page for this: Comparison to other wiki engines. Everyone can edit! Feel invited.

by Gabrys

After you get the dependencies and the Wikidot source, you need to prepare a database and populate it. Normally this means two make commands (one for postgres user and second for your regular user). The default configuration options are to provide you a simple single-wiki engine, that just works. This means, that however you connect to Wikidot (with any IP or DNS name), you get the single wiki that you created. Wikidot needs a full namespace of URLs (starting from /), so you can't simply put it along with other web applications. This is why by default we use port 8080 for serving Wikidot. Also as we rely on very custom Lighttpd configuration, we supply a config file for it (that is partially generated when doing make). But don't worry, we also have a script that let's you control it. ./wikidotctl start starts Wikidot's Lighttpd, ./wikidotctl stop stops it. Pretty straight-forward, isn't it?

But Wikidot software is also a full-featured wiki-farm solution. But you need a different database dump (that adds more wikis, like template wiki for each newly created wiki) and a different configuration. First of all, you need a full domain name namespace (for example *.mywikidot.mycompany.com). What's before .mywikidot.mycompany.com in the domain name is the name of wiki, so if you connect to abc.mywikidot.mycompany.com displayed is abc wiki. Also as this gets a bit complicated to deal with when having custom port, you need to run the Lighttpd on port 80 (the standard WWW port). This means, if you want to host a full wiki farm, you need to have a separate IP address just for Wikidot (any other web server can be run on a non-standard port only), and a root access to start Lighttpd (only root can bind to ports smaller than 1024).

Actually you need quite a lot knowledge to understand what the wiki-farm-mode Wikidot does and to configure it, but once you get it, it's quite easy. Anyway, all I want to say, is that we want to ease the simplest (and most common) installation of Wikidot. If you want to have a wiki, but want to host it yourself rather that on Wikidot.com, this is done just for you, just get the dependencies, Wikidot sources, prepare database, make and you're done. No need for painful configuration :).

If you decided to run your own wiki farm (in your company for example) start from getting single-wiki Wikidot running and then use older docs to figure out how to get it running as a wiki-farm. In case of problems, just ask on IRC channel. TIP: you need to set wiki_farm = true in [main] section in conf/wikidot.ini file.

I hope more wiki enthusiasts will get simple Wikidot running at their work and school rather than choosing other wiki engine. They used to do that, because they were simpler to install. Now this changes.

There is one more important note to make. We're going to polish the software, to make it run smoothly, so download (git clone) and test it as much as you can and please report bugs. You don't even have to be a registered Wikidot user to do that. Once we get all the quirks fixed, we want to release Debian/Ubuntu packages, that will enable you to just state aptitude install wikidot to get the Wikidot up and running in minutes without you touching the keyboard after that (well maybe to configure the Admin password). So if you can't wait for this to happen, please help us and test!

by Gabrys

The preferred way to obtain the Wikidot is cloning our repository:

git clone git://github.com/gabrys/wikidot.git cd wikidot git submodules update --init

The last line fetches additional software that Wikidot uses:

• Zend Framework
• H2o template language
• Spyc YAML file parser

Additionally I reorganized this site a bit: introduced blog, polished the theme, cleaned the outdated docs and updated the installation guide. Due to last changes to the Wikidot, it is now much easier to install. I would say, as easy as never before!

by Gabrys

The biggest change is Wikidot is now single wiki engine by default (you need additional configuration for the wiki farm mode).

What demonstrates the change is the simplified installation process.

Now it's as simple as installing any other software or service:

1. install the dependencies
   • for Ubuntu: sudo aptitude install lighttpd php5 php5-cli tetex-bin tetex-extra gs-gpl imagemagick libmagic1 subversion postgresql-8.3 php5-tidy php5-pgsql php5-gd zip make
2. get the code
   • svn co http://svn.wikidot.org/repos/wikidot1/trunk/ wikidot-install-dir
   • cd wikidot-install-dir
3. if on Ubuntu: configure conf/wikidot.ini and set user at [db] section to your login name
4. prepare database (create role and database)
   • as user postgres: make prepare_db
5. build Wikidot: configure files and make initial dabatase
   • as you: make
   • this prints a secret URL at the end, you'll use it to configure Admin password
6. start Wikidot
   • ./wikidotctl start
7. set Admin password
   • use your browser and navigate to the secret URL make prints at the end

We would like to finally create Debian/Ubuntu packages for that (once it gets more stable and have some bug fixed). So keep tuned!

by Gabrys

The thing that needs to be said is the Wikidot Source changes. It is not meant to be solid stable yet. The development of .com and OS version is quite separate, although there is a flow in code in two ways:

• fixes for bugs in .com having the way to OS
• many future improvements in .com are first tested and introduced in OS

The latter introduces not-working revisions into the OS repository from time to time, but this is a product in creation (pre-1.0), so this just can happen.

Stability

The current version (revision 317) of Wikidot Open Source is used on Wiki Complete.

It's rather stable, but you have to know the following:

Lighttpd only

It's for lighttpd only (we want support for Apache back in 1.0).

INI file for configuration

File conf/GlobalProperties.php is no longer needed and needs to be deleted. But first have a look at conf/wikidot.ini and try to migrate any custom settings you had in conf/GlobalProperties.php.

The full-blown verbose example of wikidot.ini is stored in conf/full-example-of-wikidot.ini. This is not meant to even work, it's just every possible option listed and described. If the option has an default value it is also mentioned. Use the file as the reference for your wikidot.ini file.

HTML user-uploaded files hosting disabled by default

Since it could be dangerous in certain cases, we have disabled serving of HTML files with the default Wikidot installation. However Internet Explorer (6 and 7) ignores the hint to display HTML files as source, so it's not really a solution.

The solution that really works is having a totally separate domain for hosting uploaded files only (at wikidot it is wdfiles.com). The settings for this would be:

[security] upload_separate_domain = true upload_domain = your-different-domain.com ; having different domain for uploads we can safely enable user-uploaded HTML files serving upload_restrict_html = false

Search All Wikis module

The SearchAllModule (allowing to search all wikis) is very experimental now. If you have already any content, that needs to be searched, don't upgrade (or you can restore the previous php/modules/search/SearchAllModule.php file after the upgrade).

The module is being migrated to Zend_Search_Lucene and require doing an initial indexing of all sites.

Also it's very probable the search mechanisms changes any time soon, so I just don't recommend using the new version of module.

Search This Wiki feature is unaffected!

Search Highlight

In the meantime of developing new search engine for Wikidot, we came into an idea to highlight phrases user searches for (using internal Wikidot search or Google/Yahoo search engine).

You can enable it in the wikidot.ini file appending:

[search] highlight = true

Search features (the new SearchAllModule and Search Highlighting) is already tested on Wiki Complete, however there are some known limitations it the search module, that need to be improved yet.

Upgrading

As a matter of fact, we don't supply any "upgrade" script. This unfortunately doesn't mean that there are no problems with that.

Once we release the first stable version, we'll supply upgrade scripts for each incremental upgrade i.e. 1.0 -> 1.1 -> 1.2 and so.

This is because it would be really easier if we know what version EXACTLY we're moving from to what EXACT version. Otherwise we would end up with scripts that can work but can break something. If you're in trouble with upgrading, ask on our dev-list.

See comments at original post location

by Gabrys

today I managed to create configuration file mechanism for Wikidot — based on INI file.

I posted two files — minimal one and one containing all possible options to the SVN repository:

(deleted, see the update below).

Moreover I polished the PingBack mechanisms for Wikidot.

UPDATE (May 2009): as we moved to github, here are the links for wikidot.ini and its full version:

wikidot.ini
full-example-of-wikidot.ini

See comments at original post location

by Gabrys

michal-frackowiak

In case any of you goes to FOSDEM this year (23-24 Feb, Brussels), you can meet us there. Pieter Hintjens (pieterh) is giving an opening talk on Software Patents on Saturday and I will surely hang around web/Java/virtualization-related talks.

FOSDEM is an annual event for Open Source developers, enthusiasts and users. Read more at http://www.fosdem.org/2008/

by Gabrys

michal-frackowiak

The Wikidot Team is happy to announce the open-source release of the Wikidot software. We are opening both the Version 1 codebase that currently powers Wikidot.com and the new development code for Wikidot 2, our next generation wiki platform, both under GNU Affero General Public License version 3.

We have spent many, many hours on converting Wikidot.com into an open-source project but we believe it is worth the effort. Not only you (users, administrators, developers) get another piece of useful software, but hopefully the Wikidot project itself will benefit from feedback and contributions from users and developers.

We have redesigned the wikidot.org website so that it can now be a community hub for Wikidot users. For developers we are preparing a Development wiki and later on we will discuss the development workflow.

Needless to say, we count on the community. There are several ways you could actively support Wikidot.

The current software release is as stable and bug-free as we could do within our time limits and resources. It is greatly enhanced, more modular and configurable than the original software at Wikidot.com. So if you are planning to use Wikidot in real environment (your work, school, university), give it a try! If there are bugs, we will try to fix them ASAP. (Or, if you could submit fixes, it would be even faster).

So, for all of you who are code-hungry, open-source fans and hard-core wiki users — get Wikidot, read Installation docs (and the great Debian Quickstart) and play with it!

If you want to help developing the Wikidot, join us at dev.wikidot.org!

Good luck!

The Wikidot Team

More links:
Press release

by Gabrys