A New Era: ScrewTurn Wiki on Windows Azure

You may have read that we recently shipped, in collaboration with Lokad, a production website built with ScrewTurn Wiki and hosted on Windows Azure. Well, that’s just the first step to fully support Azure as runtime environment for your favorite .NET wiki engine.

Today we’re officially starting a new project, that will be like this:

1. Resolve all known bugs that do not require architectural changes, push a new release ASAP
2. Fix the Visual Editor and make it more reliable (this requires to rewrite our Reverse Parser, i.e. the component that converts HTML to WikiMarkup)
3. Plan required architectural changes to support specific new features, in particular:
   1. Better (or swappable) search engine (e.g. via a unified ISearchProvider)
   2. Swappable editor (not sure yet)
   3. More flexible plugin SDK
   4. Better plugin ecosystem
   5. Better themes ecosystem
   6. Windows Azure blob and/or table storage
   7. Some, uhm, facility that allows to *safely* install 3^rd party plugins when running in multi-tenant instances
4. Code code code
5. Public beta in early June

Why Azure?

We’re big fans of Windows Azure. It’s a very interesting way to host web applications, and above all it allows to scale easily. Even if you don’t need a lot of computing resources, with a few dozen Dollars/Euros a month, you’d get a two-instance web role with 99.95% availability and reliable storage. It makes sense both from a technological and economical point of view.

Moreover, we’re supported directly from Microsoft. They’re happy to see an open-source project hardly working to support their cloud computing platform, and we’re excited to start this new journey.

New Team Member

To help us with this effort, a new developer is joining our team to work on ScrewTurn Wiki full-time. This is the first time in more than four years that someone will work exclusively on STW, so trust me when I say that it’s something groundbreaking.

Want to Help?

This is the perfect time to say hi and offer to help us out. So far we failed to get contributors because we somewhat demanded continued efforts. That doesn’t work, so we changed our minds. We’re fully opening our issue tracker (more info on that in a few days), so feel free to drop us a line if you want to help with something, even if it’s very small and only takes little effort.