Status Update
May 22nd, 2009 by Dario Solera | Filed under Development.Many are wondering why development is so slow lately. The reasons are mainly two:
- the new server required a bit of work for configuration and data migration
- the activity in the forum has increased a lot, thus requiring more time than before.
So, what is under development?
Basically, it’s a giant debug phase. Version 2.0.0 suffered a lot of bugs when released, and I want v3 to be rock solid. Many bugs have been fixed since version 3.0 RC0, but there is still one important problem: the search engine index gets corrupted quite often.
The reason is that words are identified with a 64-bit integer, generated by hashing the word. This turned out to be a problem because the algorithm I decided to use (named SDBM) seems to produce many collisions with real-world words. I did an extensive testing with randomly-generated strings and never hit a collision after millions of different words. Well, there is nothing worse that unrealistic test data, I guess.
I’m performing a change in the search engine so that it will use a sequential 32-bit integer for identifying words (and documents). It’s a bit more complex but it’s required.
Also, the WYSIWYG editor turned out to bee a bug mine, so I’m not sure about its future in the next versions (I mean 3.1+).
New Posts
Any reason not to use something like TinyMCE for editing?
Well, yes, the problem is that there is some specific format to keep while generating HTML. Using any existing editor would make HTML -> WikiMarkup conversion extremely hard.
I think the HTML WYSIYWG editor and Active Directory capabilities is extremely appealing to a wide range of users – not just in a business – and I think that all the extra work will be worth the time spent on it.
Not catering for less-able users (e.g. hate using wiki-markup) is going to be a major decision maker for a lot of implementers too.
Your time spent dedicated to the ScrewTurn Wiki is greatly appreciated, thank you for the work you have done so far (that goes for the other developers, bug testers and anyone I don’t mention here).
Alex
Hi,
I know you have been working really hard and just wanted to express that I appreciate your effort. Now to features, for myself I don’t care that much about the WYSIWIG editor as much as I do AD. But then again I thought the emacs and the VI editor were easy to learn and use,
. Having AD is a must have for me. The other must have was the private & public pages.
jj
There is a BBCode plugin for TinyMCE (http://wiki.moxiecode.com/index.php/TinyMCE:Plugins/bbcode), so there appears to be a way to customize the tags. Perhaps this can be adapted for ScrewTurn.
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