[xwiki-users] Converting from XWiki to TWiki

[Tchize]

Let me add, we use xwiki here since a few month. We choose it amongst
other for various reasons
1) Support for mulitlingual pages, as we work in a bilingual
environment, it was mandatory for us
2) Ability to export to PDF, as is, our collaboraters use xwiki to write
document that can be later printed in a big book
3) It's written in java, that mean it can easily integrate with our
other servlet based application
4) It was possible to customize the login system, so xwiki could connect
to our already existing list of users (would have been very difficult
with something else that java)

Though xwiki is not a polished wiki, it works well for our purpose, and
is better than other wikis we tried. Only bad point imho, is the fact it
absolutely does not work on oracle.


Btw, where is this *marvelous* tinyMCE based editor, i want to see it at
work ^^ ^^, this will be greatly appreciated by our standard users :)

Ludovic Dubost a écrit :
>
> Paul,
>
> I am myself dismayed about your attitude and your lack of respect of
> Open Source developers.
> You might be one of these people that like Open Source much more
> because it's free and because you can dig into other's people
> knowledge and creations at will than because you can participate and
> help enhance and improve it.
>
> I'm really sorry that you lack of implication (although you have been
> following the users and developers list since you have got 7 of your
> questions answered without having help answer to any of the other's
> users questions) have made you not notive that despite what you think
> XWiki has made a lot of progress.
>
> You would have seen that there is an XWiki 0.9.1252 which has many
> improved features like:
>  - TinyMCE based WYSIWYG editor compatible with the XWiki syntax done
> by a Google Summer of Code student
>  - Backlinks support
>  - Improved API with write-API and many new functions helping write
> web sites
>  - A charting Wizard done by a Google Summer of Code student
>  - Multi Wiki support like no other wiki
>  - An XPath based Query language done by a Google Summe of Code student
>  - A cluster mode contributed by TripAdvisor.com
>
> You would also have seen that a Google Summer of Code is in the works
> with:
>
> - Support JCR for storage with a migration path from hibernate
> database storage
> - A AJAX form editor
> - A new XWiki 1.0 skin implementing the Usability recommandations
> worked on last year
> - A P2P Replication protocol allowing to work Offline and run XWiki on
> multiple servers
>
> It's sad that you haven't seen that we are trying hard to build a long
> lasting Open Source Wiki able to tackle tomorrow's Wiki challenges.
> And this not only takes code, documentation, but also the ability to
> invest steadily in XWiki. I've personnally spent 2 years without any
> salary working on XWiki as I created my own company. Thanks to users
> and companies that better understand Open Source and our approach than
> you do, we now have been able to hire close to 10 people to work on
> XWiki and on projects based on XWiki. Close to 40 companies have
> trusted our services to ask us to help them build solutions on top of
> XWiki. Hundreds of companies are using XWiki for free. XWiki has been
> selected for France State funded research project on Collaboration on
> P2P and Mobility environements.
>
> Also it's funny that I've received the same day as your email
> congratulations and credits from  the Sibelius-Academy in Finland
> which has been using XWiki for the Music History Web  Site
> (http://muhi.siba.fi/ -> it's in Finnish). Apparently they have been
> able to tweak the XWiki look and feel better than you did.
>
> I'm mainly sorry for you that you don't realize that Open Source
> development means tons of hours of hard work shared with a community
> which of course is free to use it or to use something else. But I tend
> to believe that the minimum that users of Open Source software should
> have is respect for developers sharing their work with a community. I
> just hope that you will learn this while joining the TWiki community
> which I have a lot of respect for as I've been using and contributing
> to TWiki for 3 years before writing XWiki.
>
> We'll take the positive out of your nasty email, which I'm sure is due
> to frustration at not finding what you needed from XWiki (a free lunch
> ?). We'll try to learn from it to improve our documentation, developer
> guides (anybody wanting to help ?), our code quality and architecture.
>
> I realize that this email might sound a little aggressive towards you,
> but sometimes it's good to set things straight.
>
> Good luck for you in the future. I just hope you'll be a better user
> and contributor of TWiki.
>
> Ludovic
>
> Paul Dlug a écrit :
>> We just completed a conversion from XWiki to TWiki because of the
>> numerous limitations of XWiki (really awful to understand permissions
>> system, slow pace of development, lack of plugins, horrid look and
>> feel, etc.). We initially tried to convert the syntax to TWiki using
>> perl with Parse::RecDescent. Since the grammar is rather unstructured
>> and regex/exception based this isn't an easy thing to do. We were
>> successfully in hacking up a version of XWiki/Radeox that outputs the
>> XWIki syntax as TWiki syntax. Since this uses the native structures
>> inside the original java code the conversion is much cleaner.
>>
>> If anyone else is migrating from XWiki to TWiki let me know if you'd
>> like the code to batch convert the whole wiki at once. I'm happy to
>> save others the pain of doing this themselves.
>>
>> As an aside, I am dismayed at the slow progress of XWiki in the time
>> we have been using it (over a year and a half). I was also quite
>> appalled when I started digging into the code to this, it's messy,
>> undocumented, and rife with duplicate logic.
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> You receive this message as a subscriber of the
>> xwiki-users at objectweb.org mailing list.
>> To unsubscribe: mailto:xwiki-users-unsubscribe at objectweb.org
>> For general help: mailto:sympa at objectweb.org?subject=help
>> ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
>>   
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> --
> You receive this message as a subscriber of the xwiki-users at objectweb.org mailing list.
> To unsubscribe: mailto:xwiki-users-unsubscribe at objectweb.org
> For general help: mailto:sympa at objectweb.org?subject=help
> ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
>