I contacted Magnus and Brion earlier this week to let them know that I had set up accounts for them on my server which they can use to test wiki software changes. It has a fairly large database dump installed, and plenty of space to experiment, and all the softare needed to develop and test.

Brion hasn't contacted me, but Magnus tells me the setup is basically OK, so I'll make the same offer to other developers: my server is available as a testbed; please take advantage of it. It would be GREAT if some enterprising developer who didn't want to muck with the wikipedia software itself would take on writing some testing scripts--just some code that pounds on a running wiki for a while and exercises its functions. We could then run that against the running wiki on my site before installing any software change. It's no big deal if my site goes down now and then.

I also gave Magnus and Brion access to the new reorganized software base I've been working on, and I may open that up to a wider audience soon. It's doing the basic functions of displaying pages with links and all the wiki formatting, and handles user login and prefs. I still need to move the code for page editing/history/etc., many special pages, and some more internationalization over. It's going remarkably fast, but it will still take another week or two.

The new software should not only be easier to understand, faster, and more scaleable, but I've included plenty of hooks for debugging and logging features that will make it easier to diagnose problems. Just keeping everyone up to date.