[ewiki] mailing list disbanded, snapshot 2.3.0

Hello everyone,

This is the last message you'll receive from the ewiki mailing list, because
I'll unsubscribe everyone thereafter. This is neither the end of ewiki, nor of
the mailing list. It just happens that the last public release was already two
years ago, and I assume the majority of people still subscribed here might
have moved on, or lost interest meanwhile. So, no action required, if you
actually don't want this mailing list any longer.

But you're of course welcome to resubscribe, mail back. This is in no way
meant to boot you out.
It's just that the likelihood and number of people wanting out is probably
very high, and this way it means less 'collateral hassle' than if everyone
had to unsubscribe manually (request password, confirm, confirm, ..)

Second, a lot of spambots managed to get into the subscriber list - even
though no spam got through. This makes the list unmanageable. Due to
this misconfiguration, I couldn't sort this out otherwise.

#

But back to ewiki.

No, the project isn't exactly dead. I use it on a couple of web sites myself.
Just the ewiki project homepage went unmaintained, and revealed the
lack of up-to-date antispam plugins, and a few problems in the current
codebase. (No security bugs yet, fortunately.)

There's a new development snapshot in the downloads/ folder.
  http://erfurtwiki.sourceforge.net/downloads/
But I'd strongly advise against using this on a production system. It's just
there to show of a few changes from the subversion repository:
- a fixed RecentChanges plugin for MySQL
- new image uploading code, no more popups, jQuery
- got rid of ugly internal:// links, but image displaying is still a hack
- plugin .meta data is now part of the php scripts, see spin-off project:
- a new settings and plugin manager and an editable 'config.php'
 replaces the old scripts (the config.ini path is abandoned)
 http://milki.erphesfurt.de/genericplugins/
- oh, yes, and we're now using version numbers,
 and the odd second in 2.3.0 points out how unstable it is

To get some active development back, I'll probably kill off some
functionality, and reduce the number of distributed and supported
plugins.
To fix the other database and memory exhaustion bugs, and get some
long-lasting API, there will only remain support for one SQL and one
flat file backend. I'm currently peaking at PhpWiki, DokuWiki (okay, that
one hasn't much database API) and MediaWiki for some structure here.

The authentication stuff will also go the way of the Dodo. The old
ewiki_auth() API is ugly, and if we get something back, then it would best
be based upon Andys PEAR::LiveUser code (to standardize). Custom
code is out.
And I hope I can clean up and reduce some other code, without breaking
too many plugins. The new development tenor is "simplification" and
getting things done the quickest way (more guessing, magic values,
less options).

In case you haven't heard, there is now a WikiMarkupStandard, sort of.
  http://www.wikicreole.org/
I'm personally not all too happy with its dead end status ("frozen" and
no development for two years), but most Wikis will probably move to it
until next year.
So for ewiki it makes sense to get onto there too. Since the database
scheme for SQL & Files might change, and Unicode support will require
an update script anyhow - this is actually a good coincidence for ewiki.
Now the new Creole markup is rather similar to ewikis current - apart
from image tags and headlines. So there'll anyhow remain support for our
current 'ewiki2' markup. But it makes most sense to just convert existing
pages to Creole. (Until next year we're ging to see a few real Wiki/Creole-
Wysiwyg editors.)
The current wikiformat kernel can of course accomodate it, but I'm
considering just dumping it for PEAR::Text_Wiki this time. Our kernel
is with 30K not much smaller, and our string functions are actually
slower for very large pages than regular expressions would be.

So if you're still interested in ewiki and have a little time, you can help
or counsel in a lot of areas.

Best,
mario

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