Wiki at GSI: Towards a collaborative application platform

Abstract

As it is growing GSI's TWiki installation is evolving from a free-text documentation system to a rapid development toolbox for web-based groupware applications. I'd like to present the TWiki features and extensions that enable this functionality and also give a report on the current installation status in general.

Start presentation

Slide 1: Welcome

TWiki as a toolbox for bottom-up web applications

Slide 2: Situation pre Wiki

• No central documentation system in the IT department
• Most of the knowledge esp. about workflows only implicit
  • You have to go and ask
  • People must be available

Slide 3: Wiki paradigm in brief

• Collection of HTML pages (topics)
• In place editing with simple markup (WikiML)
• Easy cross-referencing using WikiWords (CamelCase)
• Revision control

Prominent Wiki implementations:

• Mediawiki
• Moinmoin
• TWiki

See my talk at last Hepix in Karlsruhe

Slide 4: TWiki praise

TWiki: A Wiki focussed on cooperate intranets

• Integrated access control on a per web and per topic basis
• Attachment support
• Tracing of most recent changes
  • Syndication with RSS newsfeeds
  • Email notifications
• Hundreds of plugins and add-ons
• Implementation in Perl based on the UNIX toolbox:
  • Filesystem based
  • RCS for revision control
  • Search using grep
• Powerful markup including macros

• http://www.twiki.org/ twiki.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Wikis 4th largest wiki apart from Wikipedia
• Successfully used by BT, Disney, Motorola, SAP, Wind River, Yahoo, ...

Slide 5: Current status

• Central installation of TWiki since 2 years
  • Substantial growth during the last six month
    • Nevertheless satisfactory performance and usability (since upgrade to recent TWiki release and hardware)
  • Central documentation and coordination tool of the IT department
  • Separate wikis for CBM and Hades collaborations:
    • Virtual Wikis : run on the same server, common codebase
    • Distinct topics, attachments and users

Slide 6: Statistics

GSI wiki key figures for September 2005:

• Total users: 270
• New registrations: 50
• Topics: 2600
• Topic views: 90000
• Topic edits: 4000
• Attachment uploads: 800

Slide 7: TWiki pros and cons

Cons

• Recent TWiki vulnerabilities
  • Debian package already secured by hardening patch
• lock, modify, unlock (RCS) instead of copy, edit, merge
  • Content loss due to early lock release (only once?)
• Editor a bit too simple:
• No offline editing

Pros

• Shallow learning curve
• Tables are easily operated thanks to EditTablePlugin and TablePlugin
• Inspirational like a good toy (a geek tool?)

• (T?)Wiki is an excellent toolbox for modelling workflows
  • bottom-up approach

Slide 8: Vacation Calendar

• Out of the box with HolidaylistPlugin:

• 20 Oct 2005 - 24 Oct 2005 - Helmut
• 10 Oct 2005 - 14 Oct 2005 - Walter - Hepix SLAC
• 10 Oct 2005 - 14 Oct 2005 - Christo - Hepix SLAC
• 07 Oct 2005 - Hans - ill -
• 17 Oct 2005 - Christo
• 10 Oct 2005 - Sergei
• 21 Oct 2005 - Sergei

Slide 9: Meeting minutes à la TWiki

Search

• Topic name or full-text search, optionally with regular expressions
  • Display of search results may be completely customized
    • may contain partial content from of the search results using pattern matching

• Retrieve a list of existing meeting minutes formatted as a table:

%SEARCH{"MeetingMinutes[0-9]{6}" scope="topic" regex="on" limit="12"
        nosearch="on" reverse="on" nototal="on" 
        header="| *Date* | *Minute taker* | *Latest change* | *Revision* |" 
        format="|  [[$topic][$pattern(.*? (\d+[ .]+\S+[ .]+\d+).*)]]  |  $createwikiusername  |  $date by $wikiusername  |    $rev  |"
}%

Slide 10: Meeting minutes à la TWiki

Templates and Forms

• New minutes are created via a simple webform:

<form name="new" action="%SCRIPTURLPATH%/edit%SCRIPTSUFFIX%/%INTURLENCODE{"%WEB%"}%/">
     <input type="text" name="topic" value="MeetingMinutes%SERVERTIME{$ye$mo$day}%" size="23" />
     <input type="hidden" name="templatetopic" value="MeetingMinutesEditTemplate" />
     <input type="hidden" name="formtemplate"  value="MeetingMinutesForm" />
     <input type="submit" value="create" />
</form>

• The created topic uses the given template

• The meeting participants are listed using the associated DataForms:

| *Name* | *Type* | *Size* | *Values* | *Tooltip message* |
| Participant | checkbox+buttons |  7  | FirstParticipant, SecondParticipant, ... |  |

Slide 11: Meeting minutes à la TWiki

Finalization

• Probably meeting minutes must not be changed after all participants agreed on their content (i.e. ISO 9000)
• TWiki:Plugins/ApprovalPlugin models this workflow

Slide 12: List of server topics

• %SEARCH{...}% again ...

• Topic creation form
  • Special topic template

• InterwikiPlugin: Shortcuts to GSI's hardware database web-frontend
  • GsiDbDetail:lxdv10

Slide 13: List of server topics

CommentPlugin for logbook entries

• %COMMENT{type="logbook"}%

• Comment template definition (UserCommentsTemplate)

%TMPL:DEF{PROMPT:logbook}%
<textarea %DISABLED% name="comment">%MESSAGE%</textarea>
<input %DISABLED% type="submit" value="Add entry"/>
%TMPL:END%

%TMPL:DEF{OUTPUT:logbook}%%POS:AFTER%
| %DATE% | %URLPARAM{"comment" newline="<br />"}% | %WIKIUSERNAME% | 
%TMPL:END%

No such template def 'PROMPT:logbook'

08 Oct 2005

Condition clear

Christo

Slide 14: A light-weight Trouble Ticket System

ActionTrackerPlugin:

• %ACTION{closed="10-Oct-2005" due="10-Oct-2005" creator="Main.ChristopherHuhn" state="closed" who="Main.ChristopherHuhn"}% Hepix talk at SLAC

Assigned to	Due date	Description	State	Notify
Christo	2005-10-10	Hepix talk at SLAC	closed	HpcGroup	edit

• %ACTIONSEARCH{...}% for todo lists
• actionnotify cron job

Slide 15: A light-weight Trouble Ticket System

• CommentPlugin
  • CommentPlugin Template to create %ACTION{...}% entries

No such template def 'PROMPT:incident'

Assigned to	Due date	Description	State	Notify
WalterSchoen	2005-10-17	Alles kaputt - Created by Christo, 07 Oct 2005 21:28:56	closed		edit

Slide 16: Carpool token management

Modus operandi:

• Drivers earn one point for each fellow passenger
• Passengers must give away one point per ride

• EditTablePlugin for from based table input

• SpreadSheetPlugin for calculations: %CALC{"$IF( $SUM(R2:C2..R6:C2) = 0, Error! Sum must be 0! , )"}%

• ChartPlugin for the diagram: %CHART{type="bar" table="carpooltokens" data="R2:C2..R6:C2" xaxis="R2:C1..R6:C1" yaxis="on" datalabel="box"}%

Slide 17: Next projects

• Project management
  • TWiki:Plugins/ProjectPlannerPlugin

• Portal for system announcements
  • Replace all wall shell script mess
  • Form-based input
  • Distribution with RSS
  • Category-based cleanup

• Email notifications enhancements
  • Immediate notifications
  • Subscribers list form
  • Plugin to automatically subscripe editors

Future: A portal for system announcements

Month	wiki.gsi.de total	hades-wiki.gsi.de total	cbm-wiki.gsi.de total	Registrations	Topics total	Topic views	Topic edits	File uploads
Nov 2003	6	6	6	6	135	560	93	4
Dec 2003	6	6	6	0	173	213	27	1
Jan 2004	6	6	6	0	237	0.1	0.1	0.1
Feb 2004	6	6	6	0	299	1009	84	5
Mar 2004	7	7	7	1	356	1049	225	15
Apr 2004	8	8	8	1	377	501	118	29
May 2004	8	8	8	0	384	443	64	17
Jun 2004	10	10	10	2	398	705	53	2
Jul 2004	13	13	13	3	458	2023	171	0
Aug 2004	13	13	13	0	606	4533	896	120
Sep 2004	14	14	14	1	631	1785	228	4
Oct 2004	16	16	16	2	644	1119	89	8
Nov 2004	19	19	19	3	687	3246	332	19
Dec 2004	20	20	20	1	703	1641	347	209
Jan 2005	29	29	29	9	829	7574	1614	382
Feb 2005	30	30	30	1	955	9573	1816	516
Mar 2005	36	36	36	6	1135	20419	2162	717
Apr 2005	78	78	78	42	1312	20316	1711	682
May 2005	81	84	87	9	1400	12335	1446	698
Jun 2005	104	126	131	44	1594	16683	1686	693
Jul 2005	139	170	175	44	1992	39954	4444	762
Aug 2005	171	209	214	39	2361	77543	2139	290
Sep 2005	202	256	268	54	2629	90517	4200	796