There’s a lot to say about the process of the redesign, which I’ll try to capture at a later date on my personal blog, since it’s been an interesting project to work through. But, For a more immediate summary of what’s been changed and enhanced (plus some gotcha bug-fixes made to MediaWiki itself), check out the Wiki 2.0 page on the wiki itself.

For the casual observer, you can get an idea of the redesign by visiting and comparing the the Wiki front page, the hCard specification and the hAtom draft specification.

We’ve also got space set aside on the wiki to file bug reports (wiki-2-issues), and feedback is welcome in the comments here as well as on the microformats-discuss mailing list.

The aim, as always, is that improvements like this to our tools will help us to more effectively work with and build microformats; I very much hope you like the changes.

As announced on the -discuss mailing list earlier this week, the microformats wiki is due a big upgrade. That’s going to be happening over the next few hours, so the wiki will be read-only for a (hopefully short) while whilst backups are taken and upgrade scripts run.

Afterward, the wiki will be updated to MediaWiki 1.13, be running some new extensions to improve authoring and reading and be updated to resemble the still-gorgeous microformats.org look and feel. This is as good a time as any to thank Dan Cederholm for the great work he did on the original theme way back when we launched.

This post will be updated with progress. Thank you for your patience.

Update 1: The wiki is now in read-only mode, and the database backed up and duplicated.

Update 2: We’re now running MediaWiki’s update script on the mirrored database. The microformats wiki is, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, rather large, and we’re skipping ahead by a large number of MediaWiki revisions, so there’s a lot to be altered. For your amusement, the script output currently reads “Deleting old default messages (this may take a long time!)…”. Rarely a truer word spoken.

Update 3: And we are live. Over the next hour or so you’ll see things move around a little as I go through and update some default page settings and start fitting things into our new categories system. I’ll also be added a new page explaining the changes I’ve made in more detail, introducing you to the new mark-up we support and, once those instructions are in place, providing a place that you can report issues and provider feedback. Thanks very much for bearing with us during this update!

On the wiki

• Din Neville has been working hard this week, updating the Russian translation of the wiki. Thank you, Din.
• datetime-design-pattern contains documentation and discussion of alternative patterns to represent dates and times.
• The parsers page has fallen a little out of date. If you’d like to help update it with links to current available parsers, please help!
• There’s a new html5 page to track changes in HTML5 which will affect microformats (both positive and negative). Not that these issues don’t affect parsing now, and won’t do until HTML5 is stable.

On the mailing lists

Discuss and Dev have been very busy with discussion around the abbr datetime pattern, there’s a lot of it and the threads cross over quite a lot. The core of these discussions should be documented on the wiki on the aforementioned page over the course of this week. The main threads are in the archive page for µf-dev and the archive page for µf-discuss

Other discussions:

• Impact of vCard 4 on hCard

On the web

• Rob Crowther has documented how to use the new microformat API in your Firefox 3 extensions
• Google have added hCard in Google Maps
• Lustro is an application to export the Mac OSX Address Book into hCards
• vAddressBook is a hack to export your Yahoo! Address Book as hCards (with hCalendar events for birthdays)
• Portable Social Networks, The Building Blocks Of A Social Web, an article by Ben Ward in Digital Web Magazine
• David Singleton’s XFN Life Stream tool shows distributed social networking powered by microformats.
• Cognition 0.1 alpha 10 was released.
• Yahoo! Search Monkey has a suggestion board for requesting new features for their microformats enhancements to Search.
• Mail Chimp have started adding hCard mark-up in the footer of HTML emails sent through their service. An interesting experiment with microformats outside the browser.
• Ueli Weiss has written a great hCard-based profile importer, allowing you to pre-fill sign up forms with hCard info, given just a URL. There’s a demo available, too.
• Kornel Lesinski has released an hCard conformance checker (validator). See using microformats.org.

Elsewhere

• It was microformats third birthday on June 20th!
• Weekly Microformats Dinner events are taking place in San Francisco

To contribute to the next issue, please edit the wiki page. Thanks!

On the wiki

• We’ve documented machine data usage in microformats (date and time formats, geographic locations, keywords in certain formats). The page is a quick reference for all the formats we specify, the all the current supported methods on how to embed data alongside your own text, in an HTML valid manner.

On the µf-Discuss mailing list

• Discussion off the back of the BBC’s request for help learning about screen reader usage.

On the web

• The BBC are asking for help in finding out how people use screen reader applications to read web pages aloud; critically, whether they have them set to always read the title attribute of abbreviation elements. Please give them some feedback if you can, it helps improve the information we have to work with on future patterns.
• Martin McEvoy has released TransFormr: A Simple set of XSLT and PHP tools for Transforming Microformats. (“Read Martin’s introduction from µf-discuss”)
• Hi5 have added hCard and XFN support to their friends lists.
• Mahalo have added microformats to their search result pages.
• Toluu have added an hCard-based profile import function to their sign-up process.

In the real world

• In Germany, Florian Beer has had his thesis on microformats published as a book; Microformats – Semantik für jedermann
• This Tuesday, 27th May, the Microformats vEvent takes place in London.

To contribute to the next issue, please edit the wiki page. Thanks!

On the wiki

• Toby Inkster has compiled a document on transforming XFN into FOAF

On the µf-Discuss mailing list

• Talk about how to use agent in hCard with hAtom to mark up journal entries

On the web

• The quite excellent Optimus transformer and validator tool (supporting all major microformats) has been updated to 0.5.1.
• Fuzzbot is a Mozilla Firefox extension to expose microformat and RDFa data within pages.

This weeks’s bulletin was put together with contributions from Toby Inkster. To contribute to the next issue, please edit the wiki page. Thanks!