$ sqlplus -s SQL> connect hr@oracle.com/hr SQL> UPDATE employees SET current = false WHERE email = "Igor.Minar@oracle.com"; SQL> COMMIT; SQL> disconnect SQL> exit
$ curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{ "firstName":"Igor", "lastName":"Minar"}' \
http://google.com/employee/
Hi guys,
Most of you don't know, but today is the 3rd birthday of wikis.sun.com. In 2007 a bunch of us decided that it was worth it to boldly go where no man has gone before and on August 3, 2007 we launched wikis.sun.com.
At that time very few corporations were actively using some kind of wiki internally and there was no known significant public wiki deployment run by a corporation. We were astonished to see the uptake and user interest and watched the project grow from a few power users and a few dozens of wiki pages to tens of thousands of users and tens of thousands of wiki pages.
Thank you all for contributing, providing feedback and helping us to make the project successful.
Despite being a small team (did you know that officially there wasn't a single person working on wikis full-time?), we managed to get a lot done and I'm very proud of our accomplishments.
I do believe that there is still room for improvements, but I made a decision that these improvements will have to be implemented by someone else. I have found a new challenge that I'm going to pursue and unfortunately it's time for me to hand the wikis project over to a new group that will oversee the operations and development of the site. I did my best to make this transition as smooth as possible and I'm hopeful that the site will be in good hands.
Just by chance my last day at Oracle coincides with wikis' 3rd birth day, I'll take that as a good sign. I wish you all the best and I hope to see you around. Internet is a small place.
Good luck to you all.
Cheers,
Igor
PS: If you want to stay in touch, you can find me at linkedin at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/igorminar
This blog post is part of the DevOps Guide to Confluence series. In this chapter of the guide, we’ll have a look at wiki organization and working with the user community. This post is going to be more subjective than the others, because the recommendation I'm going to make apply to a wiki site with similar goals and purpose as ours. I'm just going to share our experience and hopefully some of it will be useful for others.
First thing that should be clear for you when building a wiki site is what is the purpose that it's going to serve. Confluence has been successfully used for many purposes ranging from team collaboration, documentation writing, to website CMS system just to mention a few. When our team set out to build a wiki site, the goal was to create a wiki platform that could be used by anyone in our company to publicly collaborate with external parties without having to deploy and maintain their own wiki.
It was a pleasant surprise when one of the first groups of users who joined our pilot three years ago were technical writers eager to drop their heavy-weight tools with lots of fancy features in exchange for lightweight and more importantly inclusive collaboration tool. The main issue they were facing was that their processes and tools were very exclusive, and next to impossible for a non-writer to quickly join in order to make small edits. This resulted in lots of proxying of engineering feedback, and inevitable delays. With a wiki, the barrier for entry is very low for almost everyone. There is nothing to install or configure, a browser is all one needs. A wiki allowed a relatively small and overloaded team of technical writers to more efficiently gather and more importantly incorporate feedback from subject matter experts into the documentation. Of course there were trade-offs, mainly in the area of post processing the content for printable documentation (i.e. generating PDFs), but I'm hopeful that as the wiki system matures, more attention will be paid to make this area stronger (Atlassian: hint hint).
Anyway, with the tech writers on board, the purpose, goals and evolution of our site got heavily influenced by their feedback. In exchange we received a lot of high quality content that attracted new users who started using the wiki. This kind of bootstrap of the site greatly helped to speed up the viral adoption across our thirty-thousand-employee company.
When we launched our site three years ago, there were no other big corporations with a public facing wiki site (many corporations didn't even have an internal wiki yet, boy that has all changed since then), this put us into a position where we had to be the first explorers in search of best practices as well as things that didn't work at all.
Fortunately, since our team successfully pioneered the area of corporate blogging before the wikis launch, we had some experience with building communities that we could leverage.
Some of the main principles that we reused from our blogs site were:
With our principles laid out, we took these actions:
Nobody's perfect and neither are we, let's look at what could we improve.
I know I just said that popular content always bubbles up, but considering how hideous the default Confluence front page is, I'd much prefer to utilize that real estate better and highlight popular or interesting content there.
I also think that we could do a better job at highlighting hardworking community members. There were some elaborate attempts to do this, but in my opinion a more lightweight approach could be more suitable for most of the sites.
Lastly, I think that staying in touch with our community is very important, and we could have done a better job at it if we had e.g. quarterly internal mini-conferences on various topics during which we could better gather their feedback. Also some better organized training sessions for our novice users could help boost our growth even further.
The recommendations and practices that worked for us might not be suitable for all Confluence deployments, but in our case things have worked out. There are still many areas where we could have done a better job, but I guess it's good to always have some space for improvements.
In the next chapter of my guide, we'll discuss issues and solutions that are specific for Internet-facing Confluence deployments.
This blog post is part of the DevOps Guide to Confluence series. In this chapter of the guide, we’ll have a look at how to customize and patch Confluence.
Before we talk about any customization at all, I need to warn you. Any kind of customization of Confluence (or any other software) comes with a maintenance and support cost. The problems usually arise during or after a Confluence upgrade, and if they catch you unprepared, you might get yourself in a lot of trouble. Keep this in mind and before you customize anything, justify your intent.
There are several ways how to customize Confluence. For some the maintenance and support cost is low, others give you lots of flexibility at a higher cost. So depending on your needs and requirements you can pick one of the following.
I already mentioned these in the Confluence Configuration chapter — they are easy to create and usually don't break during upgrades, but they are a nightmare to maintain. Avoid them.
You can easily inject html code in the header and footer by editing the appropriate sections of the Admin UI (described in the config chapter). If this html code contains visual elements, then it's possible that your code will break during upgrades. In general I would avoid editing headers and footers in this way as much as I could unless I was doing something very simple.
Confluence themes are the way to go. You can either pick a theme that was already built and published by someone else, or you can build our own. Building your own theme will give you the most flexibility, but the cost of maintaining and supporting it will be the highest. You can do some things to cut corners, but be prepared to do some Confluence plugin development (a Confluence theme, is really just a type of Confluence plugin).
What worked well for me and our heavily customized theme, is to create our theme as a patch for the Confluence default theme. I simply symlink all the relevant files from Confluence source code into a directory structure that can be built as a Confluence theme/plugin, add my atlassian-plugin.xml and patch the files with changes I need no matter how complex they are. The advantage of this approach is that my theme will always be compatible with my Confluence version (after rebase) and I get all the new features introduced in the new version. The downside is that I often need to rebase my patches during Confluence upgrades, but with a good patch management solution (see below) this headache can be greatly minimized.
Lastly there is Theme Builder from Adaptavist. I haven't personally used this Confluence plugin because it was not popular when we initially created our theme and it was not desirable for us to depend on yet another (unknown at that time) vendor during our Confluence upgrades. If I were about to start creating a theme from scratch I would compare it with my patching method and see what gives me the most benefits. The main concern with Theme Builder I have, is my ability to version control the theme, which if not easily possible might be the deal breaker for me and many others.
I mentioned Confluence Plugins already in the previous chapter, so I'm not going to repeat myself here.
What I'm going to add is that you really can extend and customize Confluence in crazy ways via the plugins. You can either discover the existing plugins at Atlassian Plugin Exchange or you can build your own with Maven (or the Plugin SDK), Java (or another Java compatible language) and Atlassian Plugin Framework.
The nice thing about plugins is that they are encapsulated pieces of code that interact with the rest of Confluence via public API and additionally they are hot plugable. This means that in theory they should work after a Confluence upgrade and that you can install and uninstall them on the fly without a need for restart. While the latter is true in practice, the former is not always the case. Confluence's public apis sometimes change, plugins rely on behavior that was not considered to be part of the public api and the UI changes all the time, so any CSS/javascript code that relies on absolute or relative positioning or fixed DOM structure will need ocassional fixes during upgrades.
Lastly I'm going to mention that one can modify Confluence's behavior by modifying the Confluence core files, this is a large topic and deserves its own section. ;-)
Patching Confluence is definitely the most advanced way to customize Confluence, especially if you start changing the Java source code, recompiling and creating your own war files. On the other hand, this way you get the most flexibility and will be able to change anything you want, even those things that plugins can't, all at your own risk.
There are several potential issues that you should be aware of before you head down this route:
The reasons for which you might want to patch Confluence fall generally into these four categories:
Now that we know why we would be interested in patching Confluence, let's look at how to do it. Again, there are several ways, depending on what do you need to patch.
As I mentioned already, whenever you modify the source code you want to create an isolated patch that is a logical grouping of changes needed for one bug fix, config change or feature. Once you have many smaller patches like these you can apply or omit them in a build or update them one at a time when needed.
If you were to use the standard command line tools like diff and patch to work with these patches, you would probably go nuts quickly. There are far better, higher level solutions that can be used. Distributed source code management tools that are becoming an unstoppable force in the SCM arena of software development offer features that make patch management a piece of cake.
Git, for example, offer's a feature called Stash which allows you to create and maintain patches against your git repository. I don't have a personal experience with git-stash, but from the docs it looks like it should do what we want.
The solution that I've been using and loving for the past 3 years is Mercurial and it's core plugin Mercurial Queues. Working with this plugin is also well documented here and here.
Here are some main points for how I do my patching:
[defaults] diff = --git qrefresh = --git email = --git
I could go on and on about what a life-saver Mercurial Queues are but the best way to get to know them is to do some experimentation on your own. I strongly encourage you to do that, it's a good tool to have in your toolbox.
Just to give you some inspiration, here is a list of some of patches that I created for our build:
In this chapter we went through several possible ways to customize Confluence. Plugins and themes are definitely the safest and most manageable way to go, however patching if done right, will give you the most flexibility. If you use the right tools for patch management (like Mercurial Queues), you'll be able to manage big collections of patches with a very little maintenance overhead.
Next time we'll have a look at a non-technical aspect of running a large Confluence wiki site.
