IBM XPages Wiki - first thoughts and demo
Sean Cull January 21 2009 09:59:58
IBM has released their Xpages Wiki on Open NTF as part of their new initiative to support the Open Source community. You can see Steve Castledines post here, Steve is the leading light behind the the Domino Blog template and I guess the Wiki Template.
I think that this is a fantastic thing but a quick test of the template "out of the box" shows that either I have badly deployed it or it is still very much a work in progress in need of community input. I have added a list of issues here. Please note that it may be my "rapid" deployment that is the problem.
I have deployed a version >>>here<<<< for people to try. There is also a copy of the new 8.5 discussion template here. Please do not abuse them and also please note that hey are running on a fairly modest server ( P IV 3Ghz,1.5GB Ram, single disk, lots of bandwidth )
One of the stated aims of this blog is that it is not an opinion blog - there are others that do that better. Having said that here are some of my immediate thoughts :
This is a great move in freeing up the flow of useful examples from IBM. I have been looking at versions of this Wiki for some time thinking it would be nice to be allowed to use it - it will be a win - win for all hopefully
I am sure that this initial posting of the template is the tip of the iceberg and I may be rushing in too soon with an opinion !
I have been frustrated by the lack of support for the Blog template for some time. This is not any criticism Steve Castledine as he has put a lot of effort into providing information via his blog and I guess ( I have never spoken to him ) that he has had his frustrations as well. Yes there is some formal documentation but nowhere near what you would expect for a commercial "product".
If IBM think that posting this template to Openntf will allow them to have an even lower level of documentation than the blog template then I honestly believe that this will backfire badly. Yes it is open source, yes the community needs to participate but none the less people customers and potential customers will try and use it and will judge IBM by its usefulness just the same way that people judge ( and admire ) other project chefs. IBM is a huge in comparison to all of the other participants in the Lotus Community and it needs to make a proportionate effort and follow its words "offer resources to invigorate the community " with actions
Sean
Wiki Template Dev Tips Open Source XPages Lotus
2Sean Cull 1.21.2009 19:31:40 Thanks for responding Steve I guess I and others thought that as IBM had already deployed domino based Wikis in developers works that the donated code would be something that was ready for use. I hadn't twigged that it was probably a different template from the developer works one. I look forward to everything becoming clearer ! IOf I can help with testing please let me know, I am well known for being able to break things ! Sean
3Sean Cull 1.28.2010 0:01:55 The template has been updated to release 0.6 I have updated the design to version 0.6 I did think that there was a sandbox on Openntf but I can't find it Sean
Please leave a comment
1Steve 1.21.2009 19:15:04 Its a sample
You should notice the text "sample" and "iteration 1". This is meant as an XPages code sample. Its 3 weeks work only so far - but its one of few examples to allow developers to see the contruction of an XPage application.
Some of the things listed as not working are not even mentioned as features in the docs?
So please be patient, everything will become clearer after Lotusphere.