Today we're launching the new Wikidot projects forum, and starting the roll-out of Iron Giant template sites.

The new Wikidot projects forum is now ready and open for business. This is not an official Wikidot site but a community project and it creates one space for discussing all the projects we're working on ("we" = Wikidot users with support from the Wikidot team). So, no Wikidot logo or theme, but a simple theme taken from the Themes project.

What's happened over the last months is that as we have started to use and discuss the Themes project, Iron Giant, Packages project, etc. we're getting hundreds of threads, all over the place. It kind of works (thanks to notifications) but it's not tidy. When I need to find back some thread, I have to search four or five different sites. When it's easier to find information by searching my email, than Wikidot, I know we have a problem that needs fixing.

If this model (one site per project, central forum for discussions) works, we can scale it up. There are a number of other projects I'd like to start: the design project (from this blog's design area), the new documentation project, an includes project (like packages, but much simpler to use).

What's different with the new forum is that it's a pure wiki model: categories, pages, comments, tags. That does not fully work yet, there are several changes in the ListPages module we need. But it's already usable. If you want to try your own copy of the forum template that this is based on, just request a clone in the Forum.

Which brings us to some small but important changes to the Clone function. You can now set a new Master Admin when you clone a site. This means that any admin of an existing template can give you a fresh clone that you immediately own. We also fixed the clone function because it was losing parent information. Now a fresh clone should be perfect.