No, we don’t offer a hosted version of ScrewTurn Wiki, but we might in the future. If you could help us understand if and how that would work for both you and us, it would be very nice of you. How? Simply answer this very short survey: http://goo.gl/4yt2d.
Obviously, any comment, suggestion or critique is more than welcome.
We’ve rebuilt the Visual Editor backend from scratch, and it’s now available in beta in our development builds. You are now able to switch to WikiMarkup and back faster, but above all with less errors and glitches. Of course, feedback would be highly appreciated.
Regarding actual editor features, they remain unchanged at this moment, but now that we have a more robust HTML-to-WikiMarkup processor, we can start working on new features and improvements to existing ones.
On a side note, we moved our public Mercurial repository to Bitbucket and we improved those formerly known as nightly builds. We now call them development builds because they’re not built daily, but rather every time changes are pushed to the repository (actually, they come right out from our integration server). This is a huge improvement because, if we fix a bug, you’re able to download an updated compiled package of ScrewTurn Wiki in less than 5 minutes, instead of waiting 24 hours. Cool!
This is mostly a public service announcement.
We’ve migrated ScrewTurn Wiki’s repository to Mercurial, and a public clone is now available at http://bitbucket.org/screwturn/screwturn-wiki. Also, we migrated from Unfuddle to Codebase specifically to support Mercurial and public access to our issue tracker.
If you are one of those many users who run a customized version of ScrewTurn Wiki, I imagine that merging changes into a new application version was never easy. With Mercurial you can now do that more easily. Let’s see how.
Firstly, clone STW’s repository:
hg clone http://bitbucket.org/screwturn/screwturn-wiki ScrewTurnWiki
Re-apply your changes, possibly with a patch and merge tool, then commit them into your local repository.
hg commit -m "My super mod"
Every time we push new changes into our repository, you can simply pull them into your clone and easily merge them with your customizations:
hg pull hg up hg merge hg commit
This way you get the benefits of version control for your very own changes without the burden of merging them with our updates. Cool!
If you’re using ScrewTurn Wiki, then it would be great if you could fill out this 6-question survey about how you use it. It will help us designing new features and improving the architecture. Fell free to fill the survey out multiple times, one for each wiki instance you have.
And don’t forget to spread the word!
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.
Tagline: cut rough edges, eradicate weed. Or, “bulldoze the place flat“.
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.
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.
Tagline: get less users, look for more 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.
Tagline: “open-source runs on time, not on money“.
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.
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.
I’ll spare this for another post, as I have no idea it will take some time to figure out.
You’ll surely know that we have an “official” twitter account: @ScrewTurnWiki.
The funny thing about Twitter is that you can find a mention like this from user A:
I officially hate ScrewTurn Wiki.
And then, 16 hours later, from user B:
Haven’t used it myself, but hear good things about ScrewTurn Wiki
Quickly followed by a mention from user C:
I second screwturn it is excellent
It is extremely interesting, or rather intriguing, how feedback can be so different from one user to another. After all, we either suck or we don’t. Or probably we’re somewhere in between…
Interesting post from a ScrewTurn Wiki user, Brian, on why a wiki is useful for your company or team. My favorite quote:
A wiki is a web app that is available to the whole internet or even only your company’s internal network. No special tool is needed other than a browser and a network connection to get to that data, read it, and make a business decision from that knowledge.
It is flat out easier and faster to add or change a piece of information on a topic as your project of client relationship changes via a wiki. This makes it easier to keep all of your business’s information up to date and accurate.
Just a quick one to let you know that we have an official group on LinkedIn for ScrewTurn Wiki users, contributors and core developers. Everyone is welcome!
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?
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