Hi everybody,
On the mailing lists, we noticed several people trying to use XWiki in
academic environments, requesting features such as support for
mathematical equations or support for LaTeX.
We took some time to design a product that would be great for writing
scientific papers, identifying some important features, and some "would
be nice to have" features. You can see the current design proposal at
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/SPAWN (feel free to send
comment on the mailing list).
Given the fact that this is not a product which can easily be sold, and
that there are other more critical projects to work on for the moment,
the core XWiki developers cannot dedicate much time on it. This is why
we need help from the community. Whoever would like to use this product,
and has the power and knowledge to work on in, please help us.
If you are in an university as a student, you can propose one of the
sub-applications as a project for one of your classes. If you are a
teacher, you can propose some sub-applications as student projects. We
can help with coordination, more detailed description/requirements,
question answering, code review, etc.
Some of the features require mostly programming skills, while others
require more advanced research skills, like the positioned comments in a
dynamic text (adapting some sequence alignment algorithms from
bioinformatics seems the best idea for the moment, but also some fuzzy
systems theory could be applied), or an automatic merge algorithm based
on Operational Transformations, so some publications can come out of
this, too.
If we gather a few volunteers, I'll make the necessary Jira setup and
mark the product as active.
Regards,
The XWiki dev team