FoswikiCamp2014Discussion

FoswikiCamp is a new initiative to organize regular Foswiki meetups of about 3 days free-style foswiki-ing. All you need is you yourself, probably a laptop and some time to socialize.

Sprints

This is a list of rough ideas for sprints during FoswikiCamp2014. These don't have to be completed on a sprint and most probably will have to be followed up afterwards depending on the complexity of the started idea. Nor should all take place at a single one sprint. Instead, these are topics people have in the back of their mind when they come to a FoswikiCamp and that they might want to team up on. Some of these sprints might be "coding" sprints, some are more non-coding like improving docu, do some interface stuff, write up blog postings or whatever you want to sit down and discuss.

None of these topics have the status of an "official" program or something

Some of these ideas might need a real dedicated FoswikiSprint where enough people gather under this specific topic. This however should best be organized separately and made clear that this is a, say, DocuSprint or something.

Topic	Interested Parties
replace foswiki's self-made calling semantics with PSGI, the web framework for perl, inspired by Python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack	AndrewJones
move prefs beyond store api	CrawfordCurrie, JulianLevens
store config as hash + StoreToolsContrib	JulianLevens
improve documentation	SvenDowideit, AndrewJones
accurate and easy benchmarking of plugins, integrated with BuildContrib	AndrewJones
unicode in the core - is it credible? Lets's try it and see	CrawfordCurrie, JanKrueger
Revive RethinkingTopicInteraction	AndrewJones
Continuous integration server	AndrewJones
WikiWorkBench development/WikiApp Store	PadraigLennon
Release Sprint: make Foswiki-1.2.0 come true: finish pending proposals, fix anything blocking the next release, clean up and pollish	MichaelDaum,Main.CrawfordCurrie
First-time Installer and Configure Interface	MichaelDaum
Improve the WikiApp development experience: e.g. make it possible to combine any macros without escaping issues	JanKrueger

Discussion

From the perspective of a mobile user I'd like to propose that Foswiki gets a skin/app/whatever that works smoothly on mobile devices too, and I'm not talking about view only, but edit and other scripts too. Guess there already has been done some work about this, right?

-- FranzJosefGigler - 10 Dec 2013

I'd prefer to pull forces together in a sprint towards the next Foswiki release.

There are a couple of areas where work has stalled or are in a one-man-show development mode. There are things in need of plain fixing etc. Crawford is currently working on a new configure interface that has potential to completly replace our current configure infrastructure. He really needs help here. But there are other issues as well that all count up quite some.

So I'd like to encourage people join a Release Sprint. Depending on the development happening up to March, we might be in quite a good state to even have a release at the end of the FoswikiCamp or at least be almost there with the actual release following up shortly afterwards.

-- MichaelDaum - 11 Dec 2013

It's been a while since i've dug around the codebase, but i'd like to spend some time on system administration of our server, including procedures around it. Clean up some old cruft, improve monitoring, look who are still on the admin team, etc..

-- KoenMartens - 11 Dec 2013

[C.] I've just been through the trunk release blockers to get a sense of how far we are from release, and I'm actually feeling pretty good about it. If you put aside some of the more far-reaching changes we had hoped to make - such as UTF8 in the core - then it's not looking too shabby. There are, however, a few issues I think need to be addressed during the camp. These are:

1. configure - what we're going to do with it. It works, it's just very, very slow and the UI is a bit clunky.
2. Ajax calls must work, specifically calls to save currently lose the character encoding, and there are problems with push/pop topic context.
3. How do we get feedback for the many Tasks sitting waiting for feedback?

[MD] We should use a scrum-ish list of tasks (todo, in-progress, done) and people add and pick things as we proceed. Among the normal procedures fixing unit tests etc, I'd like to finish new releases for JQueryPlugin, NatEditPlugin, UpdatesPlugin as well as fixing SlideshowPlugin. There've been reports of TinyMCEPlugin/WysiwygPlugin losing changes on some rare and hard to reproduce occasions which might indicate a race condition in the javascript event processing when submiting the edit form. Opening up the TinyMCE-Foswiki javascript code revealed some quite outdated and ugly code there that I don't fully understand. Maybe somebody could enlighten me at the camp.

-- CrawfordCurrie and MichaelDaum, <= 12 Mar 2014

I have many things I'd like to spend time on, but two are particularly important to me.

1. Make sure that Foswiki development can go on. Most immediately, that means cleaning up 1.2, so I'm on board with that.
2. When that's all done with, the question is what to do afterwards. I think needs to be an overarching vision that inspires future development – if that doesn't exist, all that's likely to happen is perpetual bug-fixing and small-scale changes with limited relevance across the whole user base. I'm sure each of the more active Foswiki contributors has quite a few ideas about that that are worth talking about. Personally, I think that the most beneficial area to focus on would be the appeal of Foswiki as a platform – in other words, create more possibilities to turn Foswiki into what's needed in a given application. Even now, Foswiki is far ahead of many other solutions in that regard, but I think we can make it even more compelling and even more enjoyable to develop for. See also the FoswikiForX concept I've seen discussed before on IRC – the easier we can make it to customize Foswiki, the more different flavours of it are likely to develop.

It doesn't even have to be at the pipe dreams level – I believe there are things that can be done (or at least prototyped, maybe as plugins) even now, before 1.2. In fact there has been some high-potential work on very interesting fronts – DBIStoreContrib comes to mind, for example. In any case, I'd like to hear about everyone's ideas, no matter how concrete they are.

-- JanKrueger - 12 Mar 2014

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