Pepperminty Wiki is 5 today!
....let's celebrate with the release of v0.20. I got a notification from my calendar system yesterday that Pepperminty Wiki's birthday is today, and since I did a beta release a few days ago and there haven't been any major issues, I thought I'd time the full release to coincide with its birthday.
I'm timing it from the first commit I ever made in Pepperminty Wiki's git repository. 5 years is a long time - and as a program Pepperminty Wiki has come such a long way since then.
Today, it's actually a really useful piece of open-source software, which is evidenced by the fact that people recommend it to other people on their own. Seeing such things and hearing about where it's used are really amazing to see - and give me lots of motivation to improve Pepperminty Wiki even more.
While the number of commits a project has isn't always an indicator of quality or how complete a project is, you can usually get a pretty good idea as to how much work has been done on a project by the number of commits it has (but of course, not always). At the time of writing Pepperminty Wiki has 1,415 commits, which is more than any other project I have ever worked on - past or present. The air quality web interface (which is now more of a general sensor web interface) is my 2nd place project unless I've missed one - and at 425 commits it doesn't even come close!
To summarise the features in the latest release:
- 🌜 New automatic dark mode in the default theme! Uses
prefers-color-schemeunder-the-hood - 🌈 Added theme gallery! Read more here
- ⛵ Vastly improved search engine performance, with new advanced query syntax (with even more syntax along the way)
- 🚁 Accessibility improvements - if you're a screen-reader or accessibility tool user, I want to hear from you if you think anything (big or small!) could be improved!
Personally, I'm most proud of the optimisations to the search engine. I've actually blogged about how I did it in a 3 part series and tested it on a test wiki with ~5.9M words - while search times vary depending on your input (the new -exclude syntax will actually speed up queries) and your server hardware, a single word query for ~5.0M word wikis takes ~50ms O.o
Unfortunately, this does mean that the search index will need to be rebuilt under the new format - and will be slightly larger than before. To get a progress bar for this operation, go to the master settings and click the rebuild button.
Another notable change is the new 'mega-menu' style more menu:
That menu has been bothering me for a while, and thanks to the kind people on Reddit, I've now got a solution.
Note that you'll need to delete nav_links_extra from your peppermint.json in order for it to take effect.
Please also test the theme gallery in particular. It's brand-new in this release and quite complicated under-the-hood, so I'd appreciate some extra eyes on that.
As for when I'll release v1.0, I'm not sure. As a program, Pepperminty Wiki is certainly stable enough to be used in production scenarios today - so perhaps incrementing the version number to v1.0 would be a good idea to reflect that. At the same time though, there are a number of missing features - most notably watchlists and further improvements to the page history system - so I'm not sure when I'll be confident enough to bump it to v1.0.
Either way, I'm pretty sure that I'll keep working on Pepperminty Wiki for years to come - I have no plans to cease development at this time. While Pepperminty Wiki releases don't move at the most rapid of paces, I aim to get about 2 releases out per year about 6 months apart from each other.
Special thanks to @SeanFromIT for reporting a number of bugs which have been squashed.
If you use Pepperminty Wiki, tweet me @SBRLabs! I'd love to hear about how you're using it.
Lastly, don't forget to take a backup of your wiki before updating. While I've made every effort to squash bugs, you can never be too careful :P
Check out v0.20 here: