[xwiki-users] Converting from XWiki to TWiki

Wed Aug 30 04:48:08 CEST 2006

Ludovic,

No dish can please everyone. I would like to say something in balance.

I have used XWiki for over one year, I respect and appreciate the XWiki team very much! I have built several XWiki sites and they all are used by many. (especially our EITC2006 site) 

Every time we have a problem, we found support. That is why I could convince my team to keep using XWiki. I really enjoy seeing the growth and improvements of XWiki. 

Yes, we need more features, we need better performance, we need better look and feel, but 'we' will make it happen. I could not make contribution in codes, but I have been telling lots of people about XWiki. A growing community will produce a strong Open Source solution. From what I have seen, I know this is the right place to be. 

Keep up the good work. Thanks a lot.

Best regards,
Wei-hsing Wang
NicheUSA, LLC

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Ludovic Dubost <ludovic at xwiki.com>
> 
> 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.
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >
> > --
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> >   
> 
> 
> -- 
> Ludovic Dubost
> XPertNet: http://www.xpertnet.fr/
> Blog: http://www.ludovic.org/blog/
> XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com
> Skype: ldubost AIM: nvludo Yahoo: ludovic
> 
> 
> 

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