Wikka Developer Blog

CakePHP is a PHP application framework that makes developing web apps a snap, as much of the code is autogenerated, and if you stick to the CakePHP naming scheme for your DB schema and supporting classes, a lot of DB access functionality is created for you “on the fly.” So I got to thinking that CakePHP might be a cool way to write Wikka actions and handlers.

In fact, it is rather cool: I use WikkaCake to generate and maintain this table for the OpenNIC project.

And best of all, running CakePHP inside of WikkaWiki requires no changes to core library classes in either application. The details can be found at the CakePHP Bakery.

With the release of version 1.2, we introduced support for 100%-modular themes in WikkaWiki. We believe a wiki engine should not force you to use its default layout: the best wikis are those that can be modified to seamlessly run behind the scenes without betraying their presence or to match the look and feel of an existing website.

In this post we’ll guide you through the creation of a custom theme.
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We’ve released Wikka 1.2 RC1 for testing. Please note this release might not be suitable for production environments as it’s highly likely this version will change prior to the official release.

We need your help with testing the quality of this release! No programming experience is required. Your feedback is extremely valuable to us, as it helps us to address any problems or issues with Wikka prior to release.
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As some of you know, I have been working in the last months on a new Web service called WikiTracer designed to provide visual analytics and comparative statistics for wiki-based communities.

We think this service may be of interest to a broad range of users, i.e.:

• wiki owners, who will be able to understand more about their wiki by monitoring its growth and potential problems
• wiki developers, who will be able to assess the adoption of their product and the popularity of specific versions
• wiki practitioners, who will obtain valuable insights into the performance of a wiki and to build best practices to spur wiki adoption against quantitative analyses
• wiki researchers, who will be able to use the data produced by this service to perform large-scale studies on the evolution of wiki-based comunities

For a rationale on the usefulness of these statistics to study the evolution of wikis, you can read this paper.

The project is in alpha stage and WT plugins are currently available for WikkaWiki and DokuWiki, while support for other engines is still under development. We are looking for wikis with a fairly large user population and significant daily activity to join as alpha testers: by joining the WT tester community, your wiki will be polled on a daily basis to allow WikiTracer to collect a number of statistics on its content and population. No privacy-sensitive information is extracted, the list of indicators used by WikiTracer can be found on the WT data format specification page.

We are planning to run the test phase until early April 2009 to be able to collect sufficient data to implement the visualization tools.
If you are interested in joining (or helping develop plugins for other engines), please drop us a line at info [at] wikitracer [dot] com. To learn more about WikiTracer, you can visit its documentation wiki or pop in its IRC channel on freenode.