XWiki is 10 years old!

Last modified by Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) on 2020/01/28

Jun 13 2014

On the 15th of December 2003 Ludovic Dubost did the first commit of the XWiki software.

Thus, XWiki was 10 years old last December! What a journey it's been so far emoticon_smile

On this page we've collected some stories of XWiki users who've been using XWiki either for a very long time or who joined the XWiki community recently.

  • Vincent Massol:

     I started contributing to XWiki on the 13th of April 2005, by moving it from Sourceforge's CVS to a SVN repository hosted on ObjectWeb. I then focused on removing the Ant build and moving it to a Maven build of course... emoticon_smile I joined the XWiki SAS company a bit later, on the 15th of December 2006 which means the 10th year of XWiki is my 7th year at XWiki SAS on that same exact day emoticon_wink Since then I've never stopped working and improving the XWiki software and I hope it'll continue for a long time in the future.

  • cjd:

     In 2009 I had a project to build a database of herbs and medicinal plants, the cultures which use them and the illnesses and ailments which they are used for. I reviewed a variety of software but was immedietly impressed with the purity of XWiki's XObject model which, 10 years later, still remains unchallenged in the CMS world, let alone in anything that calls itself a wiki. As the herbs project progressed and eventually fell apart, I contributed a flurry of patches to the XWiki core (now known as Old Core) which fixed various issues I was having at the time. When the herbs project ended, I decided I wanted to work on XWiki as part of the core team. Working with this team I learned industry standard best practices, some of which I eventually rejected and others which I've refined and found immensely helpful in in the development of my own cjdns project. Four years later I'm sitting at the office in Paris working on exciting new web standards for XWiki SAS Research and hoping to leave Massachusetts behind for good. Brilliant people doing amazing things in a horrific programming language, I wouldn't have it any other way.

  • Guillaume Lerouge:

     I discovered XWiki in November of 2006. I tried it out on the first community farm, happily enough the skin looks much better today than it did back then! Ludovic's design skills weren't very good emoticon_smile I started promoting XWiki in December of 2006 at Javapolis (which had not changed its name to Devoxx yet!). I learnt a lot of new things during that event - I came in without knowing what Java was! Later on I worked on internationalization, replacing text strings with translations in many places of the codebase. All in all I think I added about 1000 translation keys. The issue was, when @jvdrean tried to commit my work, a looot of tests started failing. He had to do a lot of work to clean up the mess I had caused emoticon_smile

  • Roman Muntyanu:

     Back in 2009 we were looking for an open-source wiki system to host our project knowledge base. We have started with twiki but I never liked the way it looked and the way we had to maintain it. So almost instantly I've started looking for an alternative. To my great luck I've found XWiki with it's appealing Toucan skin on the front and Java-based stack in the back; add XWiki's extension API to this (with whole lot of extensions available though extension manager), great user support and you'll know why after 4 years passed we still actively use XWiki (despite latest coroprate Confluence is available to us). I consider XWiki to be the most advanced open-sourse collaboration system with great potential. Many thanks to team's dedication and looking forward to new releases emoticon_wink

  • Asiri Rathnayake:

     Got introduced to XWiki by one of my batch-mates who was participating in the GSOC 2007 program. He needed some help with designing the initial UI for the XEclipse plugin. While working with him on the UI, I got the opportunity to interact with the XWiki community, it was fun and I thought of sticking around. In the following year, I applied for the GSOC 2008 program and got selected to work with XWiki on developing a WebDAV extension (mentored by Ludovic). The successful completion of the project led to a full-time developer offer from XWiki SAS. Had a great time there for almost two years before I decided to pursue higher education. Right now I'm not an active contributor (due to other responsibilities), but who knows, I may come back! emoticon_smile 

  • marta:

    I first joined the XWiki project in 2006 as a Google Summer of Code student. Back then XWiki was young and had a long way to go, but nonetheless it was an amazing project supported by a team of smart and passionate people. I was accepted as a committer soon after GSoC, and a lot of what I know right now about FLOSS, software development and best practices, I owe it to the time spent as part of the XWiki team & community. Although I now switched to a different direction professionally and my contributions to XWiki have significantly slowed down in the past couple of years, I like to keep an eye on the project's evolution, watch it grow and celebrate its successes. Happy 10 year anniversary, and let's hear more great things about XWiki in another decade!

  • DE software:

    In 2011 we - the DE software & control GmbH - first used XWiki as the core of our software platform INDUSTRIAL WIKI. This is a customized wiki (or rather web 2.0 platform) tailored to the needs of the manufacturing industry, featuring maintenance tickets, auditable work instructions, digital shift book and andon board among others. For us the big advantage of XWiki is that it is an open platform which lets us add our own extensions. Right now we're building our first contribution to the XWiki community. It will add some more expandability to the WYSIWYG editor which shall be the basis for a lot more great editing features. In this spirit: Congratulations for your 10th anniversary! We wish you and the entire community on-going growth and even more success!

  • Curriki :

     curriki-members.png The Curriki team met XWiki in May 2006 and decided to embark with it. The first release of Curriki was in November 2006. The early prototype was very simple and Curriki progressively built a complete open educational sharing platform: curriki.org.

     Since then we keep enjoying the XWiki flexibility, and sometimes get lost into it. The support of the XWiki company and open-source best-practices has enabled us to keep an open-source project running and publicly displayed which has made its little descendants now under the banner "XCLAMS" (XWiki Collaborative Leaning Assets Management System).

    From a "simple wiki", XWiki has become a reliable central service of our sharing platform. The platform has reached an impressive usage statistics (till about 230,000) and an impressive amount of registered members (see the graph on the right, today's number 381,598) and of contributed open educational resources available for teachers, parents and others to choose and apply in their lectures.


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