Hey <<First Name>>,

This weekend our 7th "Hackfest" took place in Paris. This post is to give you a little insight into what happened during the three days of our development meetup. More detailed information on some of the points will probably be written during the coming months as separate social media or newsletter posts.

First of all, a huge thanks to DALIBO who kindly offered their offices for us to use. We really enjoyed the hospitality!
 

We started a small presentation of the current state of the community and development of DokuWiki, as seen by some quantifiable metrics such as  commit counts and mailing lists posts. Unfortunately, a general downwards trend is recognizable in many of these. Therefore,  rekindling  the fire of development was one of the goals for the weekend.

One project we started is to modularize the DokuWiki core. The idea is to move things that could prove to be useful to PHP developers in general out to their own libraries. To pull the libraries back into DokuWiki, the well-known PHP package manager composer is used.

Michael Haman and Michael Große worked on a project close to the hearts of many DokuWiki users: the move plugin. They finalized the many changes that had been in development over the last months and released a new, much improved version of the plugin. The plugin allows users to move pages, media files and namespaces in DokuWiki while maintaining the history and automatically updating links. The plugin now also features an intuitive Drag'n'Drop interface to do large wiki reorganizations.

Anika Henke began on her Template conversion project, previously announced in this newsletter. The converted Wordpress theme "writer" will be released soon, along with documentation on how the conversion was done. Hopefully, this will inspire others to create new templates this way.

There were also a few things started that, in the end, had to be postponed. One was the replacement of our LESS parser with a different, better-maintained library. The pull request couldn't be merged in the end because of licensing conflicts. Until these are solved upstream, we'll have to live with our older parser. Another abandoned project was the introduction of client-side local-storage-based drafts. They would provide a more reliable way to protect editing progress from unintentional loss than our current AJAX-based approach. However, integrating them proved to be more difficult than initially anticipated. A new attempt will happen after a proper concept has been developed.

PHP 7 will be released soon, and it introduces some backward incompatibilities with certain language constructs. Christopher Smith updated our code base to run successfully on the PHP 7 nightly builds. Plugin developers are encouraged to check their plugins for compatibility as well!

Our admins Frank Jørgensen and Andreas Ulm took the opportunity of being in the same room to carefully evaluate and finally execute an operating system upgrade of our server to Debian Jessie. They also reviewed the system configuration and backups and did some general cleanup.

A new plugin, to be bundled with future downloads, was started as well. It will allow wiki administrators the ability to change the style.ini variables (like colors or widths) through a simple dialog with a preview option. This will make customizing templates much easier for end users.

In addition, many other plugins got smaller upgrades. For example an incompatibility between the include plugin and the dw2pdf plugin was fixed.

As always, it was a very productive but also very fun weekend. Thanks to everyone who attended this year!