Project Status, Fall 2010 Edition
November 17th, 2010 by Dario Solera | Filed under Community.This is one of those posts that I like writing once in a while, to analyze the status of the project, draw lines, set directions. It helps to build an overall picture of the matter, filter what is relevant, vent a bit.
Technical Problems
Tagline: cut rough edges, eradicate weed. Or, “bulldoze the place flat“.
Codebase Complexity + Bugs = Kaboom
ScrewTurn Wiki accounts for more than 84 KLOC (53 KLOC code, 31 KLOC comments). It’s nothing particularly big, but over time the codebase has become particularly intricate and has grown without control. This is our fault obviously, but that’s not the point. Even having 1,811 unit and integration tests, there are still quite a few bugs, especially in all those parts that relate to the web front end. Fixing those bugs has become more and more complex and time-consuming, and many of you have surely noticed how we are not actually fixing any non-trivial bug lately.
The problem is that users are hit by the same bugs and rough edges over and over again, and they demand fixes.
On The Visual Editor
Let’s face it: the Visual Editor sucks. It probably did a lot to bring more users to STW, but it’s extremely buggy and moody. One day it works, the next it doesn’t. Plus, when it’s raining or if the temperature is higher than 26°C, it corrupts content.
Well, the idea is to remove it. Much better to have fewer happy users than a lot of disgruntled ones. It turns out we’ll keep it after all, and improve it.
Community Problems
Tagline: get less users, look for more quality.
Size Does Matter, But What About Quality?
We’re now at almost 10,000 downloads per month. If only 1% of those downloads converts to a real wiki instance, that’s 100 new wiki instances per month. We have about 100 new forum messages per month, which is a lot considering that all of them are help requests. The fact that we are not fixing bugs, let alone answer forum questions, fast enough is causing a lot of users to grow more and more unhappy with ScrewTurn Wiki.
Funnily enough, we’re de-facto monopolists in the free .NET wiki engine market. Or so it seems, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Resources Problems
Tagline: “open-source runs on time, not on money“.
Missing Resources
We’re working day and night to make our other project successful. That’s hard enough for two developers. If you add STW to the equation, well…
You’ll surely know that we have commercial licenses for those companies that cannot or don’t want to use GPLv2-licensed software, but they do not generate enough revenue to hire someone to work on STW for a significant amount of time. After all, we’re not WikiMedia Foundation.
Pre-emptive comment: of course we could offer commercial support, but that’s the most boring thing to do for a software developer. I’d like to avoid that like the plague.
Internships
We now want to experiment what we can do with a couple of interns. So, if you are a university student with some .NET experience and want to work on a somewhat successful open-source project, drop us a line.
Next Steps
I’ll spare this for another post, as I have no idea it will take some time to figure out.
New Posts
>> the Visual Editor sucks
Agree. In our STW with integrated bugtracking system we had to remove this feature (I just commented it out).
In our projects, where we have to support a visual editor, I realized a lot of html validators, cleaners (mostly for paste-from-word feature) and parsers.
>> Size Does Matter, But What About Quality?
Yes and no.
Yes = means STW still not has a lot of functionality that has other wiki engines. A big pros for STW is that it based on .NET, and it has well good structure and fair code.
No = many developers just installed the software and satisfied with base set of functionality. Some users support it by themselves (like me. I implemented some plugins and some additional functionality /bugtracking/), but not sharing it. And some developers just uninstall it, preferring other wiki engines.
IMHO, you must review the code as soon as possible, do full refactoring, extend “pluginioning” to make it able to extend some functionality like I did with Bugtracking (now it is injected to original source and every SVN Update from STW I have to accurately merge all sources, not to break my extensions.
>> Internships
But I like to spend time spare time on interesting projects. On STW as well. Contact me by email if you have some ideas how to make STW better.
I’m not a student, and far away from it
Looked at your Amanuens project – very nice idea!
I agree with the previous comment, that what would be really great is to have a full plugin functionality, like in Mediawiki. At this moment only structure for formatting/storaging plugins is available.
Fine, the visual editor will be removed. But how about being able to install visual editor as a plugin?
I was also thinking about writing some plugin to extend ST functionality, to add it semantic (web 3.0) functionality (like in ‘semantic mediawiki’), but do I have to hack in the code and merge it into every new release, or would I be able to write & install just a plugin?
Greetings all,
At my workplace we were about to adopt the Screw Turn wiki …
I have tried it and test it for the last three weeks but the above post regarding a possible removal of the visual editor, has thrown our plans into a bit of disarray…
After wasting time with media wiki, moin moin and twiki, we really thought that Screw Turn wiki was the best thing since sliced bread and you know what feature we like the most?
The visual editor, exactly what you are planning to remove…that it’s just bad news…
We like the visual editor, because you can just copy and paste from microsoft word documents and it maintains most of the formatting (try and do that with moin moin and you will hit a brick wall) I would say that the visual editor is what sets your wiki apart from the rest…
I think you should improve the editor rather than chop it off….
I really hope you change your mind about your plans…
“I think you should improve the editor rather than chop it off….
I really hope you change your mind about your plans…”
I totally agree with MIc’s post on Dec 13th. Also wanted to implement STW, but without a visual editor, I’m looking for a different one.
Can you improve it allow for a plug-able visual editor? if we paste HTML will it work?
@Mike We haven’t decided yet. We’re evaluating the possibility. Actually, we have some big news about ScrewTurn Wiki, implying that we cannot remove the visual editor.
Any word on a possibly improved Visual Editor? One of the reasons we installed STW is the ability to choose between visual and raw editing mode. But the current editor is so bad it ends up being worse than no visual editor at all.
And while I currently have “Use visual (WYSIWYG) editor as default” unchecked, it would nice to have the ability to disable it (ie hide its tab) completely.