Amusewiki 2.500

Well, well, today I released Amusewiki 2.500 and I noticed that time has passed since the last announcement here. This doesn't mean that the Amusewiki development has stopped. On the contrary. The development pace has been steady, with new features, improvements and bug-fixes. In the meanwhile Amusewiki got a new logo as well!

The most notable changes are:

  • Installation size has been cut down to the minimum with a TeXlive! repackaging (which can be installed on the fly by the installation script or via the unofficial Debian packages).

  • Support for attached files has been extended. You can now upload and display audio and video files.

  • Custom category types: you are no longer limited to authors and topics, you can have custom categories.

As usual, documentation for old and new features can be found at amusewiki.org, unofficial Debian package are at packages.amusewiki.org and sources are at https://github.com/melmothx/amusewiki.

Detailed changelogs can be found here: https://amusewiki.org/category/topic/releases.

It's worth noting that the Emacs Muse markup is supported by Pandoc (as a reader and a writer) since version 2.0, and if you use the Atom editor, there is a package for it.

Enjoy!

Amusewiki 2.222

Hello Perl community,

I realized that it's more than one year since I last announced an Amusewiki release on blogs.perl.org, so here we are again. Yesterday I released Amusewiki 2.222.

Unofficial Debian packages can be found, as usual, at packages.amusewiki.org (together with installation instructions).

The codebase is pretty stable by now, but over the past year it saw a couple of interesting improvements.

The Xapian-powered search now is a full-fledged and fast faceted search. See for example https://amusewiki.org/search

As a side-product of this improvement, I contributed to the Xapian documentation, which can now produce Perl examples as well: (to the extent permitted by the Search::Xapian module).

git clone https://github.com/xapian/xapian-docsprint

cd xapian-docsprint

make html LANGUAGE=perl

Amusewiki is proud not to lock you in, focusing instead on text distribution. There is now a /mirror route which exposes the static files (sources included). You can retrieve a full and functional copy of any site running Amusewiki with the following command:

wget -q -O - https://amusewiki.org/mirror.txt | wget -x -N -q -i -

The PDF and EPUB provided can be now fine-tuned at will, generalizing the concept of "custom formats" which was introduced earlier. Their generation is now asynchronous from the client's point of view, speeding up the publishing procedure by a good deal, as there are no more slow operations blocking it.

Last but not the least, Amusewiki saw the usual batch of parser and user interface improvements, translations, bugfixes and documentation.

See https://amusewiki.org for the full details.

Amusewiki 2.022

Hello Perl community,

This is a short announcement about the availability of amusewiki version 2.022. Since the previous announcement on blogs.perl.org, amusewiki has seen a bunch of bug fixes and improvements, both in the backend and in the UI.

The full changelog can be found at https://amusewiki.org/library/amw-version-20. The code can be download from github.

Notably, the fetching of remote git archives has been made asynchronous, so it will not block other jobs when fetching large amounts of updates.

Now it's possible to define custom formats for PDF and EPUB.

As always, unofficial debian packages are available at the same time a new release is rolled out and it's still the preferred and recommended way to install amusewiki. See http://packages.amusewiki.org/

If you want to try out amusewiki without installing anything, you're welcome to try out the sandbox at http://sandbox.amusewiki.org

Amusewiki 2.0

Happy winter solstice, Perl community!

After almost 3 years of development and more than 2 years in production, 2 talks at YAPC::EU (Granada and Cluj) and one talk at the Dancer conference last year in Vienna, I think it's time to announce Amusewiki on blogs. perl.org as well, as I consider it more or less feature complete and robust enough for a larger audience.

Amusewiki is basically a CMS, but it's not "yet another one". Its main feature is that it creates for each published text various PDF (via LaTeX) and EPUB (for e-readers and mobile devices) files, along with an HTML version. It's also able to produce slides. Also the bookbuilder provides a way to extract, merge and customize the texts stored in the archive. You may want to give amusewiki a try if you're interested in publishing and distributing texts. If you just need a wiki or a blog for posting code snippets and lolcats, you probably want to look elsewhere. Amusewiki is suitable for publishing whole books as well.

The storage engine is powered by Git and the archiving is completely decoupled from the front-end. The search engine is powered by Xapian.

The web application itself runs on Catalyst + Template Toolkit + DBIC and has a large set of tests for safe development.

The sources are (of course) freely available at github. The github bugtracker is the preferred way to post feature requests and bug reports.

Debian packages for a trouble-free installation are available at http://packages.amusewiki.org/

There is a sandbox site, if you want to try out the publishing procedure.

CPAN packages written and released for this project (markup parsers, PDF postprocessing and a OPDS producer).

There are about twenty live sites running amusewiki in the wild, with a total of a few thousands of texts, from articles, to technical documentation, to whole books.

More information and documentation can be found at the amusewiki homepage.

So, again, happy winter!