Your Account

If your account was brought over from the old CIS wiki to this one, please update your account by following the directions at AccountMigration. It'll only take a minute, and you only have to do it once. Thanks!

If you've registered a new account on this site, you don't have to do anything. I'd still recommend looking at the rest of this page to get an idea of the new tools we've added to this wiki (e.g., in-page equation rendering, graphing tools, drawing tools, and so on...)

New Plugin - 2007 April 01

The LinkOptionsPlugin has been added to our TWiki installation. This makes it easier to "dress up" or enhance the links on our pages without having to specify tons of raw HTML or CSS codes.

New Toys (Plugins)

I've installed most of the plugins that we were using on the old wiki, and by request from some of you, I've added a bunch more. In no specific order, here are some toys you might want to check out; they can really enhance your wiki topics or take the drudgery out of some tasks (e.g., plotting data).

• Editing
  • There is now a WYSIWYG editor available; it's just to the right of the Edit button.
  • TWikiDrawPlugin offers a drawing tool for diagrams and doodles.
  • The CommentPlugin makes it easy for people to leave comments and feedback in a topic without actually having to edit the page.

• Graphs and Tables
  • EditTablePlugin lets people edit the contents of a TWiki table (including adding rows of new data, or changing individual cells) using buttons and pulldowns.
  • ChartPlugin provides a way to presents tables of numerical data in your topics as various flavors of charts.
  • Need more? Okay. GnuPlotPlugin provides all the graphing capability of Gnuplot, on any data file you attach to the topic.
  • GaugePlugin gives you simple little progress bars and trend bars. Useful to graphically represent "75% done with this part of my project" and such.
  • SpreadSheetPlugin lets you treat the tables in your topics as spreadsheets. Values are always recalculated on the fly, and you can set and get values from other tables in other topics.

• Equations and Figures
  • LatexModePlugin allows you to put almost any kind of LaTeX markup into your topics. Mostly used for equations, but you can use it for other LaTeX tricks that are hard to accomplish in HTML.
  • DirectedGraphPlugin lets you describe simple directed graphs with plain text, and renders a nice image for you on the fly. This uses the Graphviz package; if you're familiar with its languages like dot, you're all set. If not, take a peek at http://www.graphviz.org/Gallery.php

• Dates and Time
  • CalendarPlugin lets you embed calendars into your topics.
  • TimeTablePlugin draws those hourly schedules people love to use to represent their class schedules, lab schedules, and so on.
  • HolidaylistPlugin embed "strip calendars"; you know, the kind people use to answer "who's in this week?" "who's on vacation?" "who's covering the collect next friday?" questions.
  • ActionTrackerPlugin lets you assign tasks to individual people and track their status with them. The system will send email to those people, reminding them when something's due. Note: the reminder schedule is kinda arbitrary, so let BobKrzaczek know if you want it changed!

• Presentations, Slide Shows, Galleries
  • SlideShowPlugin supports a simple way to make presentations in your topics. The really nice thing about this is that your viewers don't need to have PowerPoint or Impress or other special software to see your work.
  • SlidyPlugin enhances the slide show support with the W3C Slidy tools. Very nice.
  • ImageGalleryPlugin can automatically create an image gallery out of the photos attached to a topic, along with navigation buttons and other hacks. (See UserListByPhotograph for an example).

• Tags
  • TagMePlugin lets you create and apply tags to topics throughout a web. These tags can be searched on, displayed as a tag cloud, or modified by users who visit your topics. Very useful for organizing larger webs (like DIRS).

There are other plugins running, but those are the highlights. See InstalledPlugins for the complete list, if you want. More add-ons are coming, including things like PDF generators. I'll keep you posted right here in this topic as that happens.

URI Shortcuts For Viewing Topics

Sending Links to Other People

You know how, when you're sending an email to someone, and you want to send them a link to a page on the wiki, the URI is always longer than it needs to be? Specifically, there's always a bin/view/ component in there that just seems redundant, right?

I agree. Soooo... The server is now set up to rewrite the URI for you if you leave bin/view/ out of a URI that looks like it names a Web and a Topic.

Note: this is just for sending URI to folks in emails and other text outside of the wiki. Inside the wiki, you would still use the simple WikiWord notation to make links to other topics.

Typing Less in Your Browser

For those of you that have cis.rit.edu listed as a search domain in your computer's DNS settings, you can go straight to any page in our site by typing just twiki/Web/Topic in your web browser's address bar. This works in most modern browsers. The server will decode the shorthand you supply, and tell your browser what the site address really is. For example, to get to my home page, which is named BobKrzaczek in the People web,

Web Home Pages

In each web is its "home page", where a user first lands upon visiting your web. This topic is typically named WebHome. I've tried to bring over some of the content from your previous webs to them, but as you can see, the format is a little different now. Please take a look at what I've done, and feel free to edit what's there to suit your tastes.

Likewise, the web preferences topic (WebPreferences) has similar issues. Most importantly, the Allow and Deny settings for various groups was not copied over because it's a little different in this new version of TWiki. The whole user authentication system has been cleaned up.

See TWikiAccessControl for details on how access control works in the new TWiki.

Speed

You should notice an improvement in speed. We could never reliably use the mod_perl mechanism in the previous TWiki. And... we still can't. However, I found a working replacement for mod_perl, called Persistent Perl (neé SpeedyCGI). It's a much better design, and doesn't embed a perl engine into the web server. So far, it's working pretty well, I'm using it to accelerate just the view and rdiff scripts in TWiki. Let me know if you find any serious weirdness with it.

Nope, I've turned Persistent Perl off. We're getting incomplete page loads, exactly the same symptoms as reported at TWiki:Support.TWikiOrgLoadsPagesIncomplete. Crap. Well, it's still faster than the old site, so it might not be too terrible for the meantime. Drop me an email if you disagree! -- BobKrzaczek - 03 Feb 2007

Back on for the time being... I'm not sure where in TWiki this incomplete page bug lives. If it happens to you, let me know! -- BobKrzaczek - 07 Feb 2007

New Version

We've upgraded TWiki in CIS from the Cairo (3.0) release to Dakar (4.0.5). In the next few weeks, we'll move to the first Edinburgh (4.1) release, but you won't notice those changes. I wanted to move to Dakar first because it was solid and well-tested. We'll move to Edinburgh after it's had a chance to settle down "in the wild."

Old Wiki

The old wiki site is still online at http://oldwiki.cis.rit.edu/ for a while. We'll keep it out there for a bit, until we know there's nothing being left behind that we still need. Go ahead and fish old data out of it if I missed something in the migration. Other than what's listed above (WebHomes and such), I don't expect there's much that still needs to be migrated.