Hackery at the April Wikithon

By Liz Henry | April 12, 2007, 12:18 am | 0 Comments

At the April Wikithon, Socialtext developers got together – in person and online – to play around and do some hacking. Chris Dent, Matthew O’Connor, and Jon Prettyman met up in Centralia, WA to work (along with Zac Bir) on a Python REST API client using Turbogears. Their Turbogears app is like a face on top of a Socialtext wiki; it lets you edit and view the wiki from its own interface, and develop features using their tools. I haven’t seen it in action yet, but the code is in our open source repository.

In Chris’s description of the project he and Jon hope to make the code easier for others to work with:

Good hygiene in the codebase, including things like template files and configurability, is one of the keys to including other folk in the development of the code. If we’re going to do inclusive things like democratise development it has to be easier for people to get in there, mess around, turn the knobs, and build new bits.

That’s what we all plan to do at our next big face to face meeting in May, outlined by Chris and others in Plug in the Pluggability. We took our code open source; now we have to live up to that by making the code easier to work with.

Out at YAPC::Asia, Ingy dot Net worked on Spork::Parser and Module::Make, a new way to make Perl modules. Chris Simmons and Luke Closs walked through setting up a development environment on Socialtext Virtual, which runs on VMware. Luke did further work on Blikistan, resulting in a nifty new way to read our developer blogs. Luke and Kevin Jones prototyped a wiki calendar. Kirsten Jones wrote a css uploader for Socialtext Open, which should make Chris Messina happy; she also demoed a previous hack, Hydra, which puts a Web 1.0 face on top of a wiki, allowing the contents to be viewed but not edited, and styled to fit a particular web site’s look. Casey West wrote a table editor, Andy Lester spiked an effort to get mysql working with Socialtext, and Gordon McCreight created http://pageoftext.com, a plain text wiki where the page url serves as the password. In the Palo Alto co-working office, James Littlejohn and Jack Herrick joined us to work on their own wikis.

At the tail end of the Wikithon, Leslie Wu from the Stanford HCI department showed up to give us a demo of a wiki mashup using d.mix. We invited Leslie to show the d.mix demo to everyone at Wiki Wednesday. I’ll post about that separately.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Wikithon. I’d love, in future, to bring in more editors and wiki administrators and gardeners, in addition to people working on code. If, for example, a group working on a particular subject or page in Wikipedia wanted to come by and use the Wikithon to do a day-long focused burst of activity and collaboration, it would add a lot to the conversation, and they might get help and input from unexpected sources. I’ll be inviting my own group, the editors of a Feminist Science Fiction Wiki, to join in person or remotely, at next month’s Wikithon!