The KForge Project

With the latest release we’ve received quite a bit of feedback and one of the main things people have been saying is that they’d like the installation made easier (and/or better documented). We’re all too aware of the need to make it easy to get up and running quickly and we’ve have tried to simplify things as much as possible. One of the difficulties is that KForge intentionally focuses on reusing other tools extensively. This means there are quite a few dependency issues that can catch people out. One good suggestion we’ve had is to prepare a proper deb package for those on debian and ubuntu. One difficulty even with this is what we include. Some people just want subversion and trac, others just the wikis and wordpress. Do we just put everything in or do we ship a core version and leave it up to admins to install the extra plugins as and when they need them?

After nearly six months of work KForge 0.12 is out. Get it via the download page:

http://www.kforgeproject.com/download/

Or direct from

http://www.kforgeproject.com/files/kforge-0.12.tar.gz

Changes

• Wordpress and Mailman plugins (ticket:23 and ticket:34)
• Better integration of main KForge system with subsystem applications such as trac (ticket:7)
• Massive speed improvements in access to site and services (~10x)
• ‘Remember me’ support when logging in (ticket:19)
• ‘Forgot password’ support (ticket:26)
• Support for databases other than postgresql including mysql
• ‘Notify’ plugin to notify system administrators of events such as user registration and project creation
• Substantial set of usability improvements to the web interface
• Factor out core code into a separate reusable package named ‘domainmodel’

About KForge

KForge is an open-source (GPL) system for managing software and knowledge projects. It re-uses existing best-of-breed tools such as a versioned storage (subversion), a tracker (trac), and wiki (trac or moinmoin), integrating them with the system’s own facilities (projects, users, permissions etc). KForge also provides a complete web interface for project administration as well a fully-developed plugin system so that new services and features can be easily added.

For more information see the about page: http://www.kforgeproject.com/about/

Over the weekend we deployed the first 0.12 release candidate onto http://demo.kforgeproject.com/. In the process we immediately discovered one bug which hadn’t been picked up because it only affects upgrades of existing installations rather than new deployments. Thankfully the bug is very minor and is easy to fix — just use revision 67 of domainmodel rather than the current head version (revision 77). So, after a week or so of further testing the code should be solid enough to be officially released, and we can then look forward to a brand v0.12 of KForge which adds (among other things):

• A Wordpress plugin
• A Mailman plugin
• Massive speed improvements of site and services
• Remember me when logging in

With the release of v0.12 back in July we noticed some significant slowdown in the speed of access to various services, most noticeably subversion and trac (several users also commented on this). After a bit of playing around we tracked this to the authentication code for services. After a bit of serious refactoring[^1] in August we reckoned to have improved performance by an order of magnitude. Unfortunately due to commitments elsewhere and illness our planned release in September never came so the code still was sitting in trunk.

However, since we use the KForge code to run http://www.knowledgeforge.net/ we’ve been affected by this issue as much as anyone (a exemplary case of ‘eating our own dog food’). So in the end we bit the bullet and deployed v0.12dev (trunk) on http://www.knowledgeforge.net/ to see what would happen. Our rough guess based on the refactoring turned out to be about right: on a small repository update times improved by an order of magnitude (~65s to ~6s) — note that these figures depend not only on the size of the repository but the number of users and projects you have in your KForge installation.

Thus, in summary:

• The issues fixed in trunk and will be in v0.13 release due later this month or early next
• If you can’t wait for the stable release you could upgrade to trunk (which is pretty stable) — if you want to do this I suggest asking for guidance on the mailing list

[^1]: specifically: http://project.knowledgeforge.net/domainmodel/trac/changeset/47 and following changesets

KForge 0.11 is out. Get it via the download page:

http://www.kforgeproject.com/download/

Or direct from

http://www.kforgeproject.com/files/kforge-0.11.tar.gz

Changes

• system administration interface at /admin/
• complete rewrite of web interface code to be simpler and cleaner
• expanded and improved documentation
• dav access fully functional and fixes to access control: ticket:11, ticket:8, ticket:15, ticket:16
• command line interface rewritten and centralized in kforge-admin
• support for trac >= 0.9 (while maintaining support for trac 0.8)
• improved logging for development and sysadmin purposes
• other minor fixes/improvements: ticket:1, ticket:5, ticket:3

About KForge

KForge is an open-source (GPL) system for managing software and knowledge projects. It re-uses existing best-of-breed tools such as a versioned storage (subversion), a tracker (trac), and wiki (trac or moinmoin), integrating them with the system’s own facilities (projects, users, permissions etc). KForge also provides a complete web interface for project administration as well a fully-developed plugin system so that new services and features can be easily added.

For more information see the about page: http://www.kforgeproject.com/about/

After fixing a couple of bugs discovered in the RC1 (in particular ticket 16) we’ve prepared a second release candidate incorporating fixes. The code is looking pretty stable and it should not be long until 0.11 is released.

We’ve just finished adding in a major new feature to KForge: complete domain model administration from the web interface (available at /admin/). This means that all aspects of KForge from plugins to permissions can be administered from the web.

Even more importantly, because the system is reflective any changes to the domain model are immediately visible in this admin interface. This feature will really come into its own when we reuse the core kforge code base in other projects such as CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network).

The KForge command line interface has been extensively overahauled and centralized into a single script: kforge-admin (the other remaining scripts are only used for development).

Not only does kforge-admin centralize all the old commands in one handy place it also provides interactive support and makes it easier to move between different KForge installations (something also assisted by the move to a default of site-wide installation of the KForge system when you run python setup.py install). You can find more about exactly what it will do by just running: $ kforge-admin

Quite a bit of effort has been put into improving the help and making this slicker but I’m sure rough edges remain. If you encounter one please let me know (or post a trac ticket).

KForge 0.10 is formally out. Get it via the download page.

More Information

KForge 0.10 sees several major and minor improvements including:

• Improved and refactored access control system
• Single sign-on to administration and services
• Easier browsing of projects and users
• Optional captcha functionality to prevent registration spamming
• (bugfix) auto-rebuild of webserver configuration to allow immediate access to created services

About KForge

KForge is an open-source (GPL) system for managing software and knowledge projects. It re-uses existing best-of-breed tools such as a versioned storage (subversion), a tracker (trac), and wiki (trac or moinmoin), integrating them with the system’s own facilities (projects, users, permissions etc). KForge also provides a complete web interface for project administration as well a fully-developed plugin system so that new services and features can be easily added.

For more information see the about page: http://www.kforgeproject.com/about/

The next release will be renamed from 0.9.1 to 0.10 to reflect the fact that rather than being a minor ‘bugfix’ release it contains several new features, in particular a new access control system that requires an upgrade of the database.

We have now branched the code for this release from the main trunk at revision 787 (i.e. before the latest work by John to create a ‘core’ codebase) and it is available in subversion under: branches/kforge-0.10

It is has already been up and running on the testing system for a while and it seems pretty stable. After making a few final tweaks and testing it for a little while longer it should be ready for release some time within the next few weeks.