We’ve been having fun at the 2011 Foswiki Camp! As well as some great discussions (and surprisingly few arguments) we have turned our hands to some hardcore hacking. Here’s some of what we’ve been working on:

• A new skin that will provide a strong base for the default install, and a good platform to build more sophisticated skins on. We’re applying learnings from many different skin developments to create a modern, HTML5-ready, easy to extend, look and feel.
• An exciting new methodology for packaging wiki applications, including a “play pen” which allows end users to try out applications in their own safe environment on foswiki.org, before deciding whether to install or not.
• Simplified and refined installation documentation for the core.
• First steps in replacing the Foswiki::Engine and low level CGI code, with the modern web ‘Plack’ framework (the Perl equivalent of Ruby’s excellent ‘Rack’).
• A clever new plugin that will notify foswiki admins when extension updates become available, that affect their own installations, saving them from missing out on important releases.
• A nice mind-map

What we haven’t started yet, but hope to get to tomorrow:

• Help people to share their own wiki applications on foswiki.org, in an easily accessible way.
• Ease the handling of attachments, supporting multi-upload using drag and drop, pagination through large lists, and download of zip archives of multiple attachments.
• Attack the “unicode” branch with interactive testing, to see how big the hole is.

Other messages that have come from the last couple of days include:

• We want to make Foswiki something that our users never grow out of, and that means keeping up with the technology curve. Store2, unicode, and Plack are all exciting advances that help us enormously.
• Continuity – ensuring safety of data and applications – always has been, and always will be, incredibly important to us.
• We really need to have more of these camps! The ideas exchanged, and the work done, have been incredible. The more the merrier!

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