differences between TWiki and Foswiki

Hello foswiki community,

I'm thinking about making the step from TWiki to Foswiki for a wiki used internally in a company. At the moment I'm still validating the differences and how to move the site best. We have a lot of own layout and structure settings and I don't think that it's possible to just use them in foswiki without a lot of modifications - but this will not be an obstacle, as this is necessary for upgrading from one to another TWiki version as well.
So my questions to you are:
What differences are there? Especially:

Is the meta language the same?
How is foswiki managing rendering tml in formulas?
Are there the same problems with WYSIWYG editors? (They can break pages with "nested" code)
Are the plugins going to be updated regularly?
How is the general rendering with code inside other code (like SEARCH functions)?
How easy is it to delete topics, webs, users in foswiki?
Is there something like a messaging system for my users (pns or email or something like that to communicate with another user)?

I'm also interesting in anything you noticed, because before beeing able to do an upgrade I will have to convince the rest of our Wiki-team

And at least: is there a summary of all the different names and locations of the used files (templates, stylesheets and so on)?

Thanks a lot for your help and I'm looking forward to get into the material,
Carla

How headless, I forgot one of the most important questions to me ...

We are working a lot with forms and it happens that we need a new field in a current used form. I know that something like that is not really intended for TWiki. So if you add a new field to the form template you have to edit every topic using that form manually before seeing that new field. It does not suffice to edit/make a new rcs version of that topic an the server. This is quit annoying if the new field should be filled by a script (for a huge number of topics using the form), but is not shown in the topic.txt file on the server before editing the topic in the twiki ...
So is this the same with foswiki? Or are there any other possibilities?

Cheers,
Carla

Hi Carla,

there are a couple of good reasons to upgrade your TWiki to Foswiki. The most important one is that Foswiki has got a vivid community while TWiki doesn't seem to. So whenever you've got problems or need a fix for some of the extensions for Foswiki, the community is there to continually improve the overal product. In addition there are various professional services that you can hire to help you out on your undertaking. See the list of WikiConsultants.

Since the fork Foswiki has matured and improved a lot on all levels that we didn't see on the other project. At the same time Foswiki has taken care to remain 100% backwards compatible in all areas to protect the investments into existing installations while offering a forward migration path at any time.

So most of your questions - as far as I understand - address the central questions: "does Foswiki fix some of the bugs I see on my current TWiki system" as well as "is my content still safe" besides the more direct feature requests like messaging. For the specific list of bug reports that you have in the back of your mind I must say that you will have to evaluate Foswiki yourself to find out if a specific issue has been fixed already. If not, then please do report back at the Tasks web.

Your questions do come up quite regularly rephrased in one or the other way. We tried to collect these frequently questions on WhatTheForkMeans and on the UpgradeGuide. Please have a look at them and let's refine your questions afterwards here again.

Thanks.

-- MichaelDaum - 10 Mar 2011