ScrewTurn Wiki 3.0.3 is now available for download. Thanks to Masoud, we now support RTL languages and we also have the Persian localization.
I’m also very glad to announce that we have rebuilt our plugin gallery, which is now more easy to navigate and use. You can even rate plugins! The funny thing about this gallery is that it’s built entirely with STW and a few plugins that are already available. It’s kinda recursive.
Comments? Opinions?
We have migrated our other Big Project to Visual Studio 2010, still targeting .NET 3.5, and everything has gone smoothly.
I quite like the new version of VS. Although it’s still Visual Studio, it has a number of little improvements that I like already (the updated IntelliSense for example).
The big question: should we migrate ScrewTurn Wiki to Visual Studio 2010? Mind you, it will continue to target .NET 3.5 for quite a long time as we don’t want to leave anyone behind. At any rate I guess the answer will be “No! Keep using Visual Studio 2008! I don’t have the new version yet!”
Opinions? Suggestions?
ScrewTurn Wiki now supports 14 languages. They used to be more, but some of them have never been updated since 2.0 (you’re welcome if you care to help).
Handling translations have always been a pain. It’s time-consuming, it’s boring, and translation are quite never up-to-date. Last year we started developing and testing an in-house tool to let volunteers translate STW directly in their web browser, using a custom web application that talked directly with our Subversion repository. The aim was to achieve zero overhead.
As you might have heard, the thing turned out to be quite useful, so we decided to make a product out of it. Well, I’m glad to announce that thanks to Nuno and Pedro, two brave Portuguese contributors, we had our first brand new translation done entirely with Amanuens, starting from .resx files generation to the final commit.
Now, take a look at this figure: the total time we spent in handling this translation is something like 3 minutes. In case we update resource files, the system will automatically highlight changes so translators will know where to look. No more files sent via email.
This will sound like an advertisement, but Amanuens really changed how we handle translations for the better and I’m very, very happy about it. I had to tell someone!
We’re not moving to .NET 4.0 (yet), but it’s interesting to see how ScrewTurn Wiki starts up faster when run in a .NET 4.0 environment. Scott Hanselman put together a small comparison and it turns out STW starts 5.03% faster than on .NET 3.5.
It’s funny to see that our wiki engine is the fastest application in the list, but it’s also the one benefiting the smallest performance improvement. The others are all around a 10% improvement. Personally, I feel that startup time is not relevant anymore as servers are very powerful these days, moreover an improvement of 0.08s is pretty much negligible. At any rate, slower servers will benefit from the improvement.
We targeted .NET 3.5 only with STW 3.0 as we wanted to ensure that no one would be stuck to the old version because she could not upgrade .NET, and the same will happen with .NET 4.0. Although we’ll migrate the solution to Visual Studio 2010 quite soon after its official release date, we’ll still target .NET 3.5.
Last week I had the chance to chat with some folks at Microsoft Italy about STW. They wonder why wikis don’t really take off. I mean, they did take off after all, but they could be used much more widely (and wisely).
My personal opinion is that wikis are a valuable knowledge sharing tool, but they are still too cumbersome to use. It’s not writing stuff, but it’s managing information that is hard. Sharing and discussing ideas, documenting processes and sharing files are all very easy tasks. When your wiki is small.
The biggest single problem with wikis is that keeping them tide and clean is very, very difficult. With dozens users and hundreds or thousands pages, you absolutely need a strong discipline in every single participant, otherwise the thing will simply run out of control in no time. The hard part is making users understand when and how they should create new pages, how to categorize them and how to upload and share files and documents.
We geeks take these things seriously, so for a team of software developers maintaining a wiki is pretty straightforward. But what about “normal” people?
Here are a few tips for keeping a wiki that make sense (using ScrewTurn Wiki, obviously):
As I said, some discipline is required, but in order to make the wiki work, you have to really make maintenance a collective, shared task. It surely takes some time, but I think it’s really worth the effort.
Any other tip or suggestion?
I’m very happy to announce that thanks to the hard work of Matt C. and Bill F., we now have an official, fully-supported Active Directory Provider. You can find it in the standard download packages as well as in the source code.
The provider basically works like this: you map AD groups with STW groups, so that every time an AD user accesses the wiki, it is authenticated against Active Directory. The provider copies user’s data locally, most importantly the username, the display name and the email address, while the password is generated randomly. You can even setup the web.config to allow Windows Authentication (when the site is trusted in IE), so your users never have to authenticate manually.
I think it’s a great result, so I renew my thanks to Matt and Bill.
On a side note, ScrewTurn Wiki 3.0 is now available via the Microsoft Web Application Gallery, providing a simple installation experience. You can choose to either install the file-based or SQL Server-based version. It’s been quite hard to get the package right, but I think the result is worth the pain.
Just a quick announcement: ScrewTurn Wiki 3.0.2 is now available.
This new version includes a truckload of bug fixes. I know, it took a very long time, but I’m happy to say that ScrewTurn Wiki has never been so stable and reliable. Granted, there will be more bugs, but I really feel comfortable with this release. Sure, there are still some rough edges, but nothing I can’t live with. Mostly, it’s all about not-so-good performance with huge pages. The strategy of not including new features in minor releases has paid off after all.
I hate when software doesn’t work, so I’d like to thank everyone for reporting bugs and being patient enough for waiting a fix. You guys rock.
We also released a new blog theme, so if you’re reading this via RSS, you might want to fire up your browser.
We’re struggling a bit on figuring what the community really wants from ScrewTurn Wiki. I’m not talking about features, but rather about contributions. There has been some interest lately in creating a ScrewTurn Wiki Contrib project, hosted probably on Google Code, where contributors can commit their work.
We’ve taken a look at several Contrib branches of well-known .NET open-source projects, and I have to admit that the feeling is quite bad. Maybe I’m wrong or I simply looked at the worst examples, but Contribs projects feel like they are the big ball of mud of open-source, as if they have no organization. Most importantly, they rarely have any useful documentation. In short, I don’t feel like having a Contrib project would really help STW users, but I’m open to suggestions and examples.
What I really think would be helpful as a starting point is a more community-oriented management of plugins. I can see that potential contributors are driven away by the lack of feedback from plugins users. Here is what we thought:
So, what would you like to see for the ScrewTurn Wiki community?
Sit down. Make yourself comfortable.
I started working on ScrewTurn Wiki in early 2006. It was supposed to be a simple content management system for my personal website and a way to learn ASP.NET 2.0, but it soon turned out to be of interest to others, thus I decided to release it to the public.
Four years has come past, and it’s been a great journey. I learned a lot of things and the project survived three major releases and a Visual Studio and .NET version upgrade. In the meantime, I graduated and I worked in a couple of great companies, one Italian and one French. I had the chance to work on though problems with the help of cool technologies.
I wanted to found a software company since when I started attending my university courses. You know, we’re all a bit excited by the story of our predecessors: Larry and Sergey come to mind. To me, the most important source of inspiration are guys like Joel Spolsky and, more recently, Giacomo “Peldi” Guilizzoni, which is my new hero. Superstar startup founders are not the end of the story. You can learn a lot from less famous yet very competent entrepreneurs, and I had my chance to do so.
Well, the time has come. On January 7, 2010 I officially founded a new company, together with two other guys, Matteo and Michele: it is called Threeplicate Srl and of course it’s based in Italy.
What will we be doing? We’ve got something going on behind the scenes, but we’ll continue maintain, expand and improve ScrewTurn Wiki. Technically, Threeplicate has acquired ScrewTurn Wiki but don’t worry, your favorite wiki engine will continue to be free and open-source.
It’s been a hard decision, but STW is now too big to be developed by a single person and a fundamental change is needed, otherwise the project would collapse under its own weight. Mind you, Threeplicate will not be entirely focused on STW. Our goal is to make it an important part of our business, but we’ll diversify our activity quite a bit.
Besides that, we’re sure we’ll be able to build an even better ScrewTurn Wiki, with more frequent releases. We believe that STW will gain credibility especially for large, long-term projects. I’m sure that being a “real” company rather than a freelancer will attract some more sales of commercial licenses, helping to push the project forward.
Thank you for making this possible. After all without you, the users, ScrewTurn Wiki would be totally irrelevant.
I’ve finally made the decision to move the blog feeds to FeedBurner. I suggest you to update your feed reader to the new address:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScrewTurnWiki
Thank you for your attention.
As a couple of my favorite bloggers recently suffered a total data loss on their server and they had no reliable backup plan, I thought someone would be interested in how we do backups for the ScrewTurn website.
For a starter, the SVN repository is hosted at Unfuddle. svn.screwturn.eu is just a read-only mirror.
The backup is done this way, daily, via a set of batch scripts:
The most important part: how can we make sure that the backup works? Because we used it to migrate the site to a new server, and it works. The backup is all-inclusive: even scheduled tasks are backed up. The only thing that is not included is the IIS metabase, but for that I have a copy stored on my PC (also backed up daily).
Trivia:
I’m personally a bit paranoid about backups, but I think they’re worth the time and money spent.
Bottom line: in case the whole datacenter blows up, we would only lose a day worth of data, which consists of a dozen forum posts, on average. All the other data is either a copy itself (SVN) or does not change very frequently (content of the wiki, the blog).
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