Wikidot Remote API
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We are pleased to announce that Wikidot expands beyond its web interface and will be providing automated access to its resources. So far in order to edit pages, participate in discussions and post content our users had to use the web interface — point browser to a page, click Edit etc. Using remote access (API), those tasks can be performed by 3rd party applications on behalf of users.
With this new feature Wikidot can be used for more than just web publishing, and we hope for numerous new applications to emerge.
Half a million users on Wikidot
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Today, at 1.04 PM UTC, Wikidot welcomed its 500 000th registered user. We are very happy to see the growth Wikidot is experiencing — in terms of popularity, usage, features and as a business too. We see more and more interesting sites created and many vibrant communities growing, which proves our vision of creating a "wiki farm" worth its effort.
Additional level of caching added to Wikidot
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Varnish is our new forcefield
After extensive testing of various caching techniques, we have just enabled additional level of pages caching for anonymous users. We are using Varnish to do the hard job, keeping Lighttpd serving Wikidot pages for logged-in users.
Pages are cached for 3 minutes, and subsequent requests of the same URL to our backend service (based on PHP FastCGI processes) are queued in order to improve overall stability and performance.
Caching is applied only is the following conditions are met:
- it's a wiki page (not uploaded file, login screen, AJAX requests etc)
- user does not have session cookie set (this basically means users that are not logged in)
- page is accessed with http, not https
More options for free accounts
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At Wikidot, we try very hard to balance the feature set on free accounts vs paid accounts. On one hand we want the free option to be tempting enough for people to start using Wikidot and get hooked, on the other hand we would like to offer an even more tempting option to choose one of our paid plans that provide even more features that help running successful sites.
Based on the feedback we received from our users, we decided to remove a few important limitations from free accounts that, according to several opinions, are real deal-breakers when starting with Wikidot.
Things A New Project Just Needs
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Try to imagine a situation when you're gathering some people and together creating your new project, e.g. new Internet service. Everything starts from an idea, then you make a plan and try to introduce a completely fresh, magnificent solution that will rule the world. Ok, that's for the beginning.
New ListPages Implementation
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Yesterday we replaced ListPages module with its new implementation. It works exactly the same for users, but is much more elegant for a programmer.
The module is now divided into two layers. One layer is selecting pages (named SelectPages API) based on criteria and the second layer is displaying the pages using given format. SelectPages API is reusable so we will use it at least for generating RSS feeds (so that they can have the same parameters passed by URL as ListPages has).
Problems resolved
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I would like to apologize everyone who was trying to use Wikidot for the last few hours, but could not log-in or could not edit pages, without getting any reasonable error message from Wikidot. It took us more than a crazy hour to nail the problem and fix it.
The problem was caused by a piece of profiling code that was added to Wikidot by one of our developers. The code was added outside of our usual workflow, not even through the our version control system (git), thus skipping the internal review process. Moreover, the code was causing an error in a few places, but was silently damping all error messages, and not leaving any trace in the logs. This fooled us and we were rather suspecting lower-level problems with our main server.
