Have you registered? If not you should - this is possibly the most important cultural milestone in open source development in years.

As of 1.1.6.4, Wikka now supports a modular plugin framework for user registration validation. Besides the two modules that ship with 1.1.6.4 (a “dummy” template module and an invitation code module), two new modules have been developed and are available for installation. (more…)

After a lot of hard work by the dev team and beta testers, along with some great input from the Wikka community, 1.1.6.4 has been released.

Here are some highlights of the new features:
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Extensibility has always been a part of the foundation upon which Wikka was designed and built, and here at the Wikka Labs we are always working towards new ways to make Wikka even more useful to you. I’ve always been a big fan of MVC (model-view-controller) design, and thought it might be useful to explore this a bit as part of our ongoing efforts to extend Wikka via plugins.

CakePHP is a lightweight MVC-based PHP framework. With a few minor modifications outlined here, one can easily embed a CakePHP application into Wikka as an action or handler. The good news is that there are no modifications required to either the Wikka or CakePHP core installation files!

You can also find a slightly modified version of the WikkaCake writeup at The Bakery, a blog dedicated to all things CakePHP-related.

If you are new to the concept of a wiki and wish to preview some of the features of WikkaWiki, then these screencasts may be what you are looking for.
Nine short QuickTime videoclips introducing the basics of Wikka.

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The old say “when it rains it pours” has been very applicable to Wikka the last week or so…

We were just recovering from the shock of about a day downtime as a result of our DNS problems (about a day outage 11-12 November, see DNS problem solved: wikkawiki.org is back!) and traffic was picking up again but not quite back to its old level even on the 13th, due to the common delay in worldwide DNS propagation (a change can take 72 hours to reach all DNS servers in the world)…

And then another disaster struck. While throughout the DNS problems we were still reachable from some locations (due to the propagation delay), as of the 14th we suddenly were not reachable at all. Not even via our IP address. Our host (through an obviously very junior tech support person) wasn’t very helpful in initially diagnosing the problem as a domain expiration citing from obviously still outdated data instead of going to the authoritative DNS server to check. Finally we got the real diagnosis: another domain hosted on the same IP address had been hacked, and now had a page used for that most abominable of Internet scams: phishing. Our host’s “upstream” (the service provider they get their connectivity from) had - after receiving an abuse report about it - null-routed the IP address.

Surely that was the right action to take. But we were victims in that we were not only not able to right the wrong, but our sites were as cut off from the world as the hacked domain was. And our host wasn’t exactly forthcoming with information.

In the midst of the panic (what do you do when you’re helpless?) we took some emergency measures: we started by grabbing all installed Wikkas (the main domain and the subdomains) and the corresponding databases, which luckily we could still access via an administrative login. A temporary location was found to put up all this data. During the scare of the DNS problems we had also already registered a few extra domains. The plan is to set up a system where - should disaster strike again - we can have a mirror up and running with a recent version of the databases, practically at the drop of a hat.

Throughout the disaster we took turns in feeling depressed, or very angry, and while we feverishly worked on setting up an alternative, Olivier kept us sane by stolidly continuing to work on the new WikkaEdit. Like the last bit of stability in the midst of an earthquake.

Luckily the offending phishing site has now been removed and our connectivity restored. Phew! All in all we were completely unreachable for about 109 hours: more than 4.5 days.

The access graph below - around 12:30 on the server, and excluding bots - shows the effect of it all: greatly reduced traffic throughout the DNS problems, though it never completely stopped and was picking up again when we were null-routed on the 14th.

Now visitors are clearly finding us again, and the search engine bots are catching up. We’ll have to watch closely to see if we get back to normal levels though.

Meanwhile we continue to work on our backup plan - we were not ready yet, it’s a somewhat complicated operation - so we will be able to quickly migrate to another server should anything happen to our main domain, or our connectivity on our main host. We will also set up an independent “information page” where you can go for information should anything seem amiss with our site.

We hope we’ll never need our backup plan!

Many thanks to our members who quickly alerted us of the problems, and to all of you for your patience. We’re still alive and kicking!

At WikkaWiki we love wiki markup. Wiki markup is a simple and fast way to generate well structured XHTML output using a light, plain-text format that you can safely copy and paste. This is the reason why we all tend to prefer editor toolbars (or directly writing wiki markup) over feature-bloated and unaccessible WYSIWYG plugins that produce ill-structured XHTML.

Following this idea, Olivier–who recently joined the Wikka Developer Team–has done a tremendous work and rewritten the editor toolbar from scratch. The result is truly amazing and is called: “WikkaEdit”.

WikkaEdit is a new streamlined Wikka editor toolbar with more user-friendly features and a new and improved look-and-feel. It replaces the WikiEdit toolbar by Roman Ivanov, bundled with Wikka since the very first release and currently discontinued.

The basic version of WikkaEdit is included in the development branch of WikkaWiki 1.1.6.4 and features the following improvements:

• lighter and more performant code;
• improved cross-browser compatibility;
• self-resizing editor;
• additional buttons;
• improved search and replace functionality;
• indent/unindent using tab;
• new keyboard shortcuts;

But–guess what–this is just the beginning! If 1.1.6.4 introduces the basic functionality of WikkaEdit, 1.1.7 features an advanced version of the editor toolbar with a nifty inline helper for Wikka actions. The advanced version of WikkaEdit can be previewed on a demo server and is already available for testing in the nightly builds.

I’ll post separately a review of the advanced version of WikkaEdit. But first please join me in thanking Olivier for the great job he has done!

Do you or your company provide consulting, development or technical support services focused on WikkaWiki?

You can now register for free on the WikiMatrix Consultant Marketplace for Wikka and describe the services offered by your company.
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Over the last month we have been experiencing persistent spam attacks against the Wikka tracker. As a result, the tracker has been locked down as read-only until today.

I’m happy to announce that today the tracker reopens with user registration.
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