WIKINDX turns 20

Dear users,

The newly released dual version 6.6.8/6.7.0 will mark a change in the development of WIKINDX.

Release Candidate Cycle

The series of versions 6.6.1 to 6.6.8 is a long series of fixes from version 6.6.0, the last of which is the most stable. The same thing had happened on the 6.4.x series.

Indeed, version 6.6.0 released shortly before Christmas 2022 took a year. The rewrite of the citation engine was a colossal undertaking, the fruits of which we hope to see in the months and years to come. However, it caused a lot of bugs.

To avoid the necessity for rapid-fire fixes, such as the recent releases, which themselves may contain serious errors, and to communicate clearly about the versions that we consider stable and usable in production, we are setting up a Release Candidate (RC) system.

The publication of each new stable version will be preceded by the publication of one or more Release Candidates (e.g. X.Y.Z-rcN) each having a lifespan of one to two weeks.

The life time of the RCs will be spent testing and intensively debugging the final version. The number of RCs will not be defined in advance: there will be as many as needed.

We invite people who follow development closely to install these pre-releases on non-production servers, if they are not afraid to get their hands dirty, to help us by testing and hunting for bugs.

Visibility of the project and participation of the user community

Despite the very active development we receive very little feedback from the user community. And almost no contributions.

With knowledge of the expectations of the community we could make better choices.

This is why exchanges between developers will be public in the future on Forums and we will endeavour to publish a roadmap of future versions.

This will be an opportunity for the community to give its opinion, to intervene in the developments and to make contributions in code, debugging and interface testing, documentation, translations...

Change of perspective

We are considering abandoning the component system in its current form. Why such a turnaround?

This system appeared with WIKINDX v4 in 2012 after a complete rewrite (4 years of work) of WIKINDX v3 in order to open up the possibility for users to write their own extensions and to share them. Apart from a few rare contributions, this vision did not materialize. On the contrary, the tunnel effect of the rewrite (4 years) has alienated half of the community.

In 2017, full of hope, we relaunched this effort to arrive in 2020 at version 6 which has a component administration interface and a real experimental component distribution server. Between 2020 and 2021 we improved the plugin system (although it is far from perfect), added the possibility of translating plugins and the core on Transifex with a user friendly interface, documented the API code, and published the online reference manual to allow development of plugins. 2022 was devoted to rewriting the citation engine and enhancing the style editor.

Despite all these efforts, we have not received any component contribution. We conclude that, for the moment, the user community is not interested in such a system and we must concentrate on other objectives.

What could become the components?

• The plugins would be integrated into the core.
• The bibliographic styles, on the contrary, would be further developed with an online sharing mechanism integrated into WIKINDX. They are what makes the richness of WIKINDX coupled with its integrated word processor.
• The templates would be removed in favour of a unique, up-to-date design, which is customizable through a style sheet and options instead of Smarty code.

So it would be a reduced component system that focuses on the essentials and frees developer time for more important things. And on the other hand we would like to focus on improving the fundamentals, providing better usability and more functionality. For example, significantly improve word processing as an academic tool (collaborative if possible), add connectors for resource platforms, manage more import/export formats.

We also had other ideas that may interest the community such as:

• A turnkey installer for Windows
• Free and/or paid WIKINDX instance hosting for those who do not want to host themselves.
• Transform WIKINDX into a community portal, a bit like github or a software forge applied to the academic world, on which one can collect and share resources, and do collaborative writing.

What would you like to see in WIKINDX? Help to us achieve the research environment of your dreams.

Provisional roadmap following 6.7.x

Software architecture

• Normalize the database
• Migration to SQLite db engine (?)
• Simplify update and installation
• Redesign the components system

Features

• Continue refining the word processor (other export formats such as DOCX, multi-user authoring, real-time citation formatting). The goal is a self-contained, multi-user, academic-authoring system, from idea through to article/monograph submission.
• Expand the number of bibliographic styles.
• Speed and efficiency optimisations.

. . . further down the road:

• Systematic reviews
• World domination

Wish list

• Give the design a facelift (We really need help on this!)
• Plugins for LibreOffice/Google Docs/Word (A version for Google Docs works but we can't keep pace with Google's changes)
• Translations reviewed by users

WIKINDX turns 20

I started WIKINDX when I was newly embarked on a PhD ("The Acoustic Ecology of the First-Person Shooter") mid-2003 with the first release on SourceForge in November of that year. As a poor, self-financing student I could not afford commercial bibliography managers and, in any case, from what I had seen, I was sure I could do better.

In just under three years, I got WIKINDX to the state where I could write my thesis entirely in WIKINDX's in-built word processor,
select the bibliographic style, and produce a formatted RTF file that, with a little polishing, I could send to the printers.

Since the basic configuration of searchable bibliography manager with citations (remember index cards?), accessible to the built-in word processor, there have been several changes and additions. The basic code has been rewritten (and continues to be so) and the database structure improved. Bibliographic style creation and editing has been simplified, interfacing with other bibliographic formats has improved, and new functionality, such as the storage of ideas, user groups, and personal bibliographies, has been added.

WIKINDX continues to be developed and remains free software used not only by institutions but also, I hope, others in the same situation I was in 20 years ago.

— Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard

The last five years have been rich. Among the major changes we can count: full support for UTF-8, component management, a renewed and multilingual citation engine, extended full-text search for many document formats, an LDAP connector (for institutions ). Not to be forgotten is an improved search engine, excellent response times even on large databases, and continued support for new versions of MySQL/MariaDB and PHP. Most of the improvements are imperceptible but constitute a solid basis for building for the future and demonstrate the vitality of the project. We will continue to lay the foundations for what we hope will become a collective adventure. We hope that WIKINDX is software that you find useful and enjoyable and that you find as much pleasure in using it as we have in making it. We invite you to rejoice with us on how far we have come.

— Stéphane Aulery

Happy new year 2023.