[Amw-developers] About AMW + first links

[Peleg Michaeli]

Hello friends.

This mail will try to give some more detailed explanations about FreeLy in
general, and about AMW as a FreeLy project.

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== FreeLy ==
FreeLy is a '''family''' of projects, which has a few features in common:
a. All original code that is written in those projects (not including
dependencies, which make the whole project LGPL) is '''open''', '''free''',
and belongs to the '''public domain''' (see a different mail about
'''licensing''').
b. This family of projects aims towards easier life for small groups of
non-expert users that want to use the web in an efficient way. That mean
that the tools should be '''simple''', '''friendly''', and
'''light-weighted'''. This is in the price of design, which has to be simple
as well (that is not necessarily a drawback!)
c. It aims to provide solutions that are absent in the current webspace.

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This family contains the following projects:

=== FreeLy PPS ===
A personal pages system, which is a system that handle's personal pages -
like blogs, just without timeline. We thought that the blogs fashion is not
enough for people who just want to publish their poems, their artwork, or
their articles about several subjects. The PPS allow users to handle textual
contents, media (mostly images, but also mp3 and similar) and links, and let
them control their side menus, RSS options and other features (most of them
are already implemented).

This project is on Alpha stage, but it works on our shared server, with
about 20 users, for a couple of years. There are bugs, but we hope to
reconstruct the project so it'll be friendly for other volunteers
(programmers) to join (now the code is still very patchy.). We also plan to
make it XHTML valid (now it's not).

This software is almost completely in the public domain, excluding the
WYSIWYG editor which is TinyMCE and has LGPL license.

The project is built using PHP4 (but supports PHP5) and works with Apache2
and MySQL 4 or 5.

You can see a running version of this software here: www.freeall.org/peleg
(my own personal page) - currently the used pages are only in Hebrew, but it
works with language files, and an English file exists, so
internationalization will be easy.

=== FreeLy DBM ===
DBM stands for Database Management - Many small groups and organizations
really need a simple database management program. Many of them use Microsoft
Access, which is not free at all, and does not provide a good web-based
solution that so many organizations want. Microsoft also provide other
web-based solutions, and some of them are probably good - but we couldn't
find any real open-source solution that is very easy to install, and handles
small databases and an efficient and friendly way.

We hope to build a new database management tool, which will be as simple as
can be - its aim is to provide, for one authorization level, an ability to
control pre-defined information in related table, in a very flexible way.
The tool should also provide easy summary features, like automatic graphs
and etc.

The tool is supposed to be very light-weighted, and Ajax-based, and is
supposed to fit for small databases (up to 20-30 different tables, up to
5,000 records in each).

This project is in Planning Stage, with no code available. The project will
be built, at first, for MySQL5/Apache2/PHP5.

=== FreeLy VSF ===
VSF stands for Very Simple Forums. This tool should be an extremely simple
rich-text forum, that won't give any fancy options, but only a pure
discussion. It should support mas-o-menos the same "design" features that
AMW should provide - rich-text + some tags, but nothing more.
It should be in Threaded view, and allow exports and imports to different
types of data (like RSS, XML, plain TXT, etc.).
The forum should also support the same "plugins" as AMW - like LilyPond
(music notes), MathML (for math), php highlighting (for programmers) etc.
A good FreeLy Integrator should make VSF and AMW use the same plugins, of
course.

=== FreeLy AMW ===
A short description about the main project that we are dealing with in this
discussion: AMW stands for Ajax Micro Wiki - This project is a micro wiki
supposed to support a solution for a collaborative and scientific
environment for light-weighted projects, such as cooperative learning, data
sharing, hierarchical knowledge base, light programming projects management
and etc. This is an extremely small wiki-based engine, with a very easy
installation, that is supposed to combine the benefits of the Wiki concept
(with a long history of every page, using "delta" smart DB) and the benefits
of web-shared documents (collaborative edits - multiple editors in the same
time, smart merging algorithms). One of the unique advantages of the project
should also be the fact that it is almost totally Ajax-based: indeed, it
makes it less efficient for large projects like Wikipedia (therefore I am
not suggesting only an extension for media-wiki) - Ajax is executing many
queries and many scripts all the time - but it is just perfect for this
project's audience: small group of 10-100 users that will want to share
information with each-other, without the need to refresh pages after every
single typing-error correction.

This wiki should also offer hierarchical arrangement of date (unlike in
media-wiki: tree-views, etc.) - as an option; one more important feature is
its ability to support many free formats of information, and not only text
contents, like: integrated MathML (using ASCIIMathML - LGPL license; will
also provide TeX translation), SVG automatic-generated graphs, GraphWiz
(dot, at least), LilyPond music notes generator (need mod_tex, I am not sure
about the license but it is some kind of GNU. The license of LilyPond is
GNU), code highlighting for programmers environment, and so on.

The project will be built, at first, for MySQL5/Apache2/PHP5. The project
will be built, as a start, in English, but will supply internationalization
support and themes support.

The project is in Planning Stage, but is highly-detailed planned, and
programming had already started. This is the main project that we want to
distribute freely, hoping that other programmers will feel how important is
that project as much as we feel. Currently there is no solution for such
simple demands.

This project should also offer many other features; but I shall detail it in
a document which will be sent to you.

== Links ==
I would detail here the important links and site-names that we will work
with. All of it might be only temporary, so expect changes.

=== Savannah ===
GNU Savannah (https://savannah.gnu.org) has approved FreeLy AMW as an open
source project and are willing to host it. though, they cannot provide us
execution rights, that is, we cannot run the code on their servers (but only
save a static version of it). Therefore, we host the '''files''' of our
project on a different site - TuxFamily (see the next subsection).

The most relevant url for now is this mailing list's archives:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/amw-developers/

I suggest that you browse it in thread view, or use the search feature.

Savannah are the nice free-software activists that host part of our project,
and our mailing lists will be there.

Our project page in Savannah - not so important (relevant only to registered
Savannah users)
https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/amw

Our project HOMEPAGE in Savannah - currently empty -
http://www.nongnu.org/amw/

We will use Savannah also in order to find people that want to help this
project.

=== TuxFamily ===
Tux are our main host; they provide us almost everything we need (and we are
grateful for that! :-) )

The most important URL in Tux is our SVN repository there - the place where
all of the files of the project will be, including branches and tags
(pre-releases).
We will talk about SVN in another time, but in the meanwhile you can have a
look here:
http://svnweb.tuxfamily.org/listing.php?repname=freelyamw/main

Currently there are almost no files/folders there, but there will be soon.
Any one of you that will program something in AMW will use this url a lot...

The main homepage of this project, that will also have a demo version of the
running AMW code, is here:
http://freelyamw.tuxfamily.org/
Currently it is (almost) empty, but soon I will build our page there. This
page is the basic page that we should refer people to, if they want to know
anything about the project, or contribute.

One last thing: in the '''near future''', we will have Mantis (a bug
tracker) here:
http://freelyamw.tuxfamily.org/mantis

Stay tuned! :-)

=== Our server ===
In our server you can now find one related page, which is very important
now, and has all of the information that is still not in our new homepage,
about features, ideas, etc... It is here:
http://wiki.freeall.org/index.php?title=Ajax_Micro_Wiki

You are MORE than welcome to add your opinions and ideas about the project
there, and/or on the matching discussion page.

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I think that this is enough for one day.
Please reply if you have anything to say or ask.

Cheers,
Peleg.