CoWiki
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- The correct title of this article is coWiki. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
coWiki is an inactive wiki engine implemented in PHP 5 and using a MySQL database. It is licenced under the GNU General Public License. coWiki uses a markup language similar to that of TWiki.
It is notable because it was one of the largest projects being developed while PHP 5 was still in early development.
Distinguishing features:
- Unix-style access control
- Database back-end
- Pseudo-hierarchical file system
Contents |
[edit] coWiki History
The creator, Daniel T. Gorski, originally began development of coWiki in December 2001 as a weekend study to learn how a wiki works.
The first release (0.2.0) was in March of 2002 for the BLUE MARS GmbH intranet.
Daniel began to look for new maintainers for the project on January 3, 2005.[1] New maintainers were found on January 12, 2005, lead by Paul Hanchett.
Development soon moved into the open source software host tigris.org, where the 0.3.4 maintenance release was completed by the new staff on February 24, 2005.
By April 2006, it became obvious that the maintainers did not have the personal time to spend on the project, and on June 13th 2006, maintainer status was changed to include some new people. By November 2006 there was no development activity and very little mailing list activity.
On November 7th 2006, it was announced that the cowiki.org website would be taken down and archived, awaiting a new team for the project.
As of November 2006, coWiki is still used in a production capacity on personal and corporate websites and intranets. Daniel and a handful of other developers still offer consultation services and custom-programming focused around coWiki installations.
Commentary from the website stated 13. December 2006: After almost five years of evolvement of the coWiki web collaboration software project, the development has been discontinued. The project passed away... Alas, all I must now sadly say is: R.I.P. coWiki.
[edit] The "bad magic" bug
The website says If you find it, do not install it - it is evil and will destroy you data sooner or later.. This problem was dubbed "bad magic".
A page would roll back to an earlier version. No references could be seen in the site or page history/changelogs. Edits would simply vanish. This was most notibly seen on the homepage and it is possible (but not confirmed) that it could have happened on other pages.
This bug was first seen by Sy Ali and would become significant enough to warrant a migration to MediaWiki in late 2004.[2] However, it would take some time before it would ever be seen in another installation. The first and only known time where this bug had been seen by others was when the distribution's own coWiki installation began showing this bug around 0.3.5.[3]
At first, it was theorized that this bug would happen on installations which are heavily-trafficked and allowed public editing, as Sy's installation allowed. However, the coWiki.org website did not allow public editing of or commenting on its main page. Even after significant research and rewriting, this mysterious problem could still not be eliminated.
It was one of the most significant blows to the project.
