I'm happy to announce that we've just gone live with a new cairo wiki at:
This is an ikiwiki-based wiki that replaces the MoinMoin-based wiki that was lost a couple of months ago, (it also replaces the static- HTML placeholder we had in place in the interim). Here are some of the benefits of the new setup:
RSS/Atom feeds for news items, automatic update of front page with latest news.
Syntax is more sane, (uses MarkDown which uses either _underscores or *asterisks* to indicate emphasis_ rather than insane ''italics'' and '''bold''').
Completely integrated with git, meaning:
The distributed nature of git gives us another level of redundancy in backups, (so hopefully we'll never lose our wiki content again).
Standard git tools work for browsing history
Regular contributors can just "git push" changes without using any obnoxious web interface, (but the drive-by user can use the web-interface and know nothing of git).
Templates and CSS for theming are right there alongside the source in the git repository, (not locked away in some database requiring the obnoxious web interface to edit them)
We encourage anybody to start editing the website to improve it. Add your tips and tricks, things you've learned about cairo, and things you're confused about. I'd also be glad to have people contribute larger scale reorganizations and cleanups. The wiki requires only the most painless registration step imaginable, and then allows web-based editing by anyone willing to go through that registration step.
Now that we've got this new wiki in place, here are some projects that I would like to see happen:
Resurrect the old samples (cairo-snippets) and get them nicely integrated with the wiki
Similarly, get all the old cairo-demo stuff into the wiki
Put the cairo documentation into the wiki where people can, (if not directly edit and improve it), at least click on a "discussion" link for any given page to indicate where there are any questions about any items.
Our documentation has never really grown past simply being API function reference, and I'd really like to see some real reference material and tutorials get written. I'd also like to expand the set of output targets we're getting. I know we're currently publishing HTML and at least devhelp from gtk-doc, and I'd definitely like to get man pages and PDF output as well.
Maybe we can do all of that with gtk-doc, but it might be easier to shift to something like AsciiDoc instead.
If you (like me) would rather not ever use a web form for editing web content, then you can get the cairo wiki source via git through one of the following URLs:
git://cairographics.org/git/cairo-www
git+ssh://cairographics.org/git/cairo-www
where the second requires a freedesktop.org account, but allows users in the cairo group to push changes out via git.
Recently, there have been a lot of very useful things floating by on the mailing list, and I'd love
You may notice that the look and feel of the website has changed. That's partly just to be different and partly to help indicate that things have changed. If you find the new look tacky, you can blame my utter lack of web-design talent and you may consider this an invitation to help fix things. One huge benefit compared to our MoinMoin setup is that we now have much easier mechanisms for controlling templates, etc. and everything is done in a much cleaner fashion, (semantic HTML with CSS styling, etc.). For example, the navigation bar at the top of each page is really nothing more than an unordered list as far as the HTML is concerned, then it's styled with CSS to have the horizontal look.
Currently, changes to the cairo website will be mailed out to the cairo-commit mailing list. The wiki is supposed to have its own mechanism for subscribing for notifications to specific pages, but it doesn't seem to be working yet.
Finally, I'd like to extend thanks to Joey Hess for writing ikiwiki and for being very receptive with questions from me, (and accepting a few patches as well), as I put this together.
-Carl