Since the beginning of Wikidot it has been growing evolutionarily and became a stable, popular and powerful collaboration and publishing platform. Today I would like share an idea that hopefully could take Wikidot one step ahead.
In the beginning, as opposed to traditional "wiki" collaboration software, which required dedicated software (and often hardware) for each site, Wikidot offered a way to quickly set up multiple sites. As a Wikidot user you can create one, five, or even fifty sites and they are set up automatically.
Now imagine this: how about automatically creating not a single site, but a whole Wikidot-style service? Let me introduce:
Wikidot Clusters!
The shortest explanation of a cluster is: an isolated set of sites and users, separated from the shared environment of Wikidot. Actually it would work as a Wikidot instance just for you.
About a year ago in one of our December blog posts we were aiming to keep downtime under 5 minutes per month and we have finally achieved it. To keep our reliability so high we are still improving our code, infrastructure and monitoring services.
During the last year we used many techniques and involved a few software solutions that together made our service more reliable, available and stable for both anonymous and logged-in users.
As we described just after introducing the solution, we let Varnish cache pages for anonymous users. This means the application servers do less work and the service is less loaded overall.
If you live in Europe you have probably noticed the recent attack of winter. It's not surprising, since it's already December. Nonetheless there are big problems with the public transport and huge traffic jams in almost every city in Poland. Literally, we're stuck.
Nevertheless the Wikidot team is so awesome, that we always get to work on time. Even if we cannot make it to the office, we work remotely. Do you know what's the most significant difference between the external world and Wikidot? While everything is covered with a thick layer of snow, cars are not working, people are freezing on bus stops — Wikidot is up and running regardless of weather conditions. So are we :)
Thanksgiving is a great day. It is about tradition, history, family, but most importantly — about realizing what we are really thankful for in our lives.
We live and work in Poland, but Wikidot is a global project. Over 90% of our users and clients come from abroad and we often feel we participate in national holidays all over the world, despite cultural diversity, historical differences and political boundaries.
The same applies to Thanksgiving — here, in Poland it's not a tradition at all, but we get the spirit of this holiday and take this day as an opportunity to share our gratitude for things that happen in our lives. And there are a lot of such things.
From the early days of Wikidot, it's been a service that relies heavily on free and open source software. This was one of the most important thing that made it so successful. Without free and open source software we wouldn't manage to create and maintain this service so well.
The most important open source we use on our servers is:
As DataForms seem to be problematic for Wikidot users we wish to present you a small tutorial — how to create an editable table using Forms. As an example we will create a catalog of weapons for an online game.
Let's start!
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