Wagn blog entries
Update: Thanks, 1.0-ward, Leads, and Wagneers
Thanksgiving
"Truly appreciate those around you, & you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, & you'll find that you have more of it." --Ralph Marston
Wagn 1.0 update
With the recent leaps forward in Wagn's performance and browser support, we're starting to hear the question: why are you still calling it 0.10.3? Why not go ahead and call it 1.0? Well, we're getting close, and we expect to reach that milestone in early 2009, but we're still working to make that an extremely high quality release. The key areas of work remaining include some bugfixes (like restoring our nifty auto-save feature), community visibility (like showing user names on the recent changes page), and the kinds of features expected from any Web 2.0 site (like RSS feeds).
Looking for Leads
We're trying to fund continued development of Wagn through wagn-based web projects and would love references. We're reaching out to social media gurus who might put Wagn in their toolkit and to foundations, nonprofits, and academic institutions who can use Wagn to further their missions.
Becoming a Wagneer
Our Become a Wagneer tutorial project helps people teach themselves to become expert Wagneers -- people who build cool structures and systems using Wagn. If you're into it, be a guinea pig and let us know how it turns out.
Update: Speed, Chicago, Hosting, and Hooze
Ethan, Lewis and John just had our weekly Wagn meeting. Justin will be joining us next week. We intend to send out an updates like this after each meeting [or two], as part of focusing more attention on the Wagn community (that would be you!).
- Recently we've made a *lot* of progress on performance (server- side averages down from 2-3 seconds to ~300 milliseconds on connectipedia.org!). And browser compatibility will be greatly improved in 0.10.3, bringing IE6, IE7 and Safari up to nearly par with Firefox (we're also starting to look at Chrome; anyone know how we're doing in Opera?).
- When the three of us were together in Chicago earlier this fall we got clear that we want to put a lot of attention on Wagneers -- to grow a community of people who build stuff in Wagn. This remains important to us, and, we've realized that a good end-user experience is just as important. So in the near term we will focus on fixing bugs and polishing up things that will make Wagn smooth and wonderful for regular users.
- By the time we release Wagn 1.0 we certainly want it to be easy for people to download and install. But for now, we're going to focus more intently on our hosting and consulting, both to build up our own Wagneering chops, and to get some income flowing.
So, new draft pricing is up at Hosting and Consulting. We want to make sure this works for current and potential Wagneers, so if the prices seem prohibitive in general, or for you in particular, let us know! We are open to adjusting the pricing to get the right balance, as well as to making special deals with people whose work we want to support.
(There will be no rate changes for existing users - and we would never do that without consulting with people first.)
Tangential Tidbit - Justin will be focusing on Wagn now. After he spent a few months working hard to secure funding for Hooze, we have made the sad but we think good decision to let Hooze go. We may come back to a project like that later, but it would be a fresh start.
Wagn 0.10 and beyond
We're very excited about the incremental releases we've made since Wagn 0.10. Wagn 0.10+2 introduces a new look — cleaner, bolder, less busy (what do you think?); we appreciate Paul Bloch's mockup for getting this started. With Wagn 0.10+3 we're taking compatibility more seriously — we're already well on our way to having things look good and work properly in Internet Explorer and Safari, and have started on Google's new Chrome browser too.
There are a bunch of changes that came with Wagn 0.10 that we want to share with you too, from the technical — we're compatible with Rails 2 — to the spectacular:
HTML cards are as powerful as the web itself, making it possible to embed videos, Twitter feeds, live chats, and any other web service that's out there directly into a Wagn card. Welcome, YouTube:
We also upgraded the text editor (now using TinyMCE). This made it possible for editing to work well in Safari, and handles a bunch of other longstanding annoyances, for example now you can resize text boxes. There's no link editor for now, so linking means learning to use double brackets.
Wagn is easier to customize now — you can decide what information will be requested of new users and what their welcome email will look like, and changing the sidebar is now as simple as editing *sidebar. These and other configuration cards which let you control the site logos, the Wagn's home page, etc. can be gathered into a Config card.
We changed names from "template" to "form" for talking about the cards that can control other cards' layout, card type, default permissions, etc. We also separated the two ways a form is applied — instead of using +*template cards in all cases, we now use +*tform cards for forms that are applied based on a card's Type, or *rform for forms that are applied based on the Right-most part of a card's name. (((((We also came up with more ways to apply forms — a given pattern of cardtype-cardtype or cardtype-rightside can now determine a card's form. ??not done yet, check)))))
You can now set the view of cards returned by a Search when you include a Search card. Until now they could only be in closed view. See "Specifying view of cards in lists" on nesting for more details and an example.
In nesting and CQL, you can now use _self to reference a card's name. On a compound names you can also use _left or _right to reference the names of a card's left and right parts. For more on both of these, see contextual references. This can be combined very powerfully with HTML cards and web services, sending variables based on the name of the card you're in to get back appropriate information for the context — you can see this in action at Connectipedia. The map, chart and tables there are pulled in from DataPlace, using an HTML card with an iframe with src="http://{ {Dataplace+uri base|raw} }table/{ {_left|name} }" (similarly, the link is generated with [ [http://{ {Dataplace+uri base|raw}}table/{ {_left|name} }|table] ] )
Simpler web addresses for searches and new cards — see web address for everything.