TWiki

Note: The review of PBR (Paul Reiber) omits his TWiki connection as a "TWiki.net" (the corporate) "independent consultant". It is in his business interest to say nice things about TWiki. It would be professional if he'd indicate that conflict of interest in his review. But he didn't, so I mention it here.
Since most of the original coders are no longer listed as consultants after the coup, he has a privileged happy hunting ground he probably would rather keep to himself.

TWiki *was* a good tool when it had a vibrant community and represented a best-of-breed solution. But trademark shenanigans and a VC-funded company argued with the community who'd written most of the latter generation code, ultimately locking them out. Development, since November 2008, has been minimal, and the "community" web site is now a Stalinist zone that zealously purifies itself against any mention of what happened. The author of the lockout now styles himself the "benevolent dictator for life", but unlike other self-styled free software monarchs, he presides over a mostly Potemkin kingdom of old code and marketing.

Fortunately, *all* the developers walked out together after the lockout (save the trademark holder and one employee). They founded Foswiki, continuing the GPLed TWiki codebase. It now has 32 core contributors (compared to 2 for TWiki) -- see the listing here: http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/BlogEntry36 . The Ohloh project metrics for development of the two projects show where the action is quite clearly: http://bit.ly/fwstats

The projects are compatible -- Foswiki builds from the same codebase with the same programmers -- and migration isn't much more complicated than an upgrade -- plus there's an active IRC chatroom for realtime help.

As to the other analogy of Foswiki as "Fedora to Redhat" -- Redhat has a large team of professionals who, with community assistance, manage both Fedora and RHEL. The Ohloh statistics are simple and to the point: TWiki no longer has a significant developer community. Let me repeat that: development almost at a standstill compared to Foswiki. Look at the SVN logs! If that somnolence defines a "stable" project, it's a somewhat different definition of stable than I'm familiar with. Foswiki has patched hundreds of TWiki bugs and though there was a period of about two months after the lockout during rebranding when it could be called "beta", it's by any reasonable definition a more mature and stable project than TWiki. It's got the same programmers. It has the last two release managers for TWiki (Kenneth Lavrsen continues as release manager for Foswiki). Essentially the *same* people who brought you the current TWiki, which is now bitrotting.

Many of the featured installations trumpeted from TWiki.org have migrated (Motorola, one of the larger worldwide installations, pays the salary of the Foswiki release manager). Others are doing so (Yahoo, which runs the world's largest TWiki instance, hired a FT programmer to oversee the migration and push Foswiki upstream development) The University of Minnesota, another site shamelessly pushed for TWiki PR, is administered by yet another new Foswiki programmer, who has migrated several UMN installs and is working on the "big" one (there's a blog entry on their site). But you'd never know this from reading the "community" TWiki site. That's warning enough. Free Software is about openness. Eliminate the openness, lock up the trademarks, and is there anything left to trust?

By the way, the twiki.org "community" site listing of consultants who understand (who *wrote*!) the codebase was peremptorily stripped of the former core programmers who were locked out -- that it was done by sleight of hand rather than outright does not change the ethics. (The page was "reorganized" and only those who had signed the imposed "code of conduct" naming Thoeny the benevolent dictator could edit the requisite new entries).

Meanwhile, expect a flood of PR and FUD here, as TWiki has started the marketing engine to reply to this (see their sparsely-attended release meeting minutes of 12 April 2010). Thoeny and Peter Jones are committed to writing hagiographies to apply CPR to the brand. Gasbaggery is its own art form: I expect masterpieces.

Oh yes -- one last request? Remove the image of my web site (with the Foswiki logo clipped) from the promotional video you have front and center. It's really in spectacularly poor taste.

TWiki rocks. Pure and simple. I use TWiki for both personal and professional projects, and for both internet and intranet based solutions.

It's a mature wiki, with extremely powerful capabilities. It has a reasonable learning curve, a large installed base, and many developers worldwide know the technology.

You might have heard about 'foswiki'. They seem to be making a lot of noise about TWiki, so I'll make some noise about them:

Foswiki is to TWiki as Fedora is to RedHat.

You use Fedora if you want to experiment with the latest bleeding-edge innovations, and you use RedHat if you want a stable product release cycle and proven, vetted components.

Similarly, you can use Foswiki to experiment with the latest plugins and capabilities, and use TWiki for your stable production wiki needs.

There are some within the Foswiki community who seem to be quite upset that, rather than killing TWiki, their fork has only made it stronger.

Well, that's one of the hallmarks of a solid open-source project; it can survive competition and, indeed, thrive in a competitive market.

Features of TWiki that rock:

- separate webs for separate needs

- private, public, protected webs

- powerful search, include, and statistical functions

- variables, templates, skins

- extreme customizability

- solid topic management; great data integrity. All changes to topics are tracked.

- boatloads of documentation

- over a decade of development and refinement

- framework is solid and virtually bug-free

- built using solid, reliable supporting technologies

So by this point I'm guessing you can tell I'm a pretty big proponent of TWiki. Let me tell you some of the ways I've used it:

* I first used TWiki in the late '90s as the 'corporate knowledgebase' for my startup, Open Country. TWiki was used at Open Country for the entire life of the company.

* I've installed, configured, populated, or otherwise supported TWiki installations for dozens of corporate clients over the past decade

* I use TWiki myself, in both public and private installations.

* I tried foswiki, and just didn't find it compelling compared to TWiki; it wasn't much different, and some parts just broke. Those with more patience and tolerance for pain might appreciate it more than I did.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments about TWiki. I'm happy to help people get past hurdles and otherwise better use and understand the tool.