Surveying our Community to Mark the Release of v5.3.7
The new v5.3.7 release, a survey of users like you, MultiWikiServer spotlight, and an update on our future plans
Hello there!
There has been a great deal going on in the world of TiddlyWiki since our last newsletter. Today we have released a new version of TiddlyWiki, and we are inviting the community to complete our 2025 Community Survey. We also have some exciting future plans to share, and an important appeal for your help.
You will find a warm welcome for your thoughts and questions at the TiddlyWiki forum.
New Version Released on 7th July 2025
There are 29 important bug fixes in v5.3.7, and a handful of new or updated features. The highlights include:
Updates to the Chinese, French, German, Greek and Japanese translations
CodeMirror plugin updated to v5.65.19
New hidden setting for the default type for missing tiddlers
New control panel setting to specify the default tiddler info tab
Support for images in AVIF format
You can upgrade your existing single file wikis here:
https://tiddlywiki.com/upgrade.html
For Node.js users, the new version is available on npm at https://www.npmjs.com/package/tiddlywiki
As usual, please exercise caution when upgrading, and take care to keep backup copies of everything important.
Our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release.
Community Survey
The core developers work hard year by year to continuously improve TiddlyWiki. Part of the satisfaction is that we are not just building software for ourselves, we’re serving the needs of a wider community of users.
That begs the question of how we can understand the needs of these other users. We do it in an informal way through every interaction with users on the forum, or on GitHub, but once in a while it can be useful to do take a more formal approach, such as a survey.
Please take our new TiddlyWiki User Survey
So, we would like to invite you to participate in the TiddlyWiki User Survey 2025. This brief, anonymous survey is designed to give us insight into the needs of TiddlyWiki users, with a mix of structured and freeform questions.
The results of this survey will help inform future developments, helping us focus on what would make TiddlyWiki better for you, both as software and as a community. Even longer-term, it will help us refine the future vision of the project, ensuring it is based on the needs of our community.
The survey will remain open until Monday, 11th August. Shortly afterwards, we will aggregate and share the findings.
Community Wiki Information Reporting
The most common way to get information about how people are using your software/website/app is to track their activities with cookies or other identifiers. It is standard across the industry that each time you click a link, or type into a text box, another little record is added to a central database, building up into a comprehensive picture of everything you do. There is an entire industry around aggregating and interpreting the information that is gathered.
TiddlyWiki is never, ever going to invade the privacy of our users in that way. A painful consequence of our stance is that we lack the sort of metrics that are commonplace in our industry, even something as simple as the number of unique visitors per month to the website - let alone things like the most popular plugins, or most common configuration choices.
To try to address this gap, today we are launching a new way for users to report high-level information about their wikis. Sharing the information is entirely voluntary, and intentionally entirely manual. The wiki information is presented as a plain text box whose content can be copied to the clipboard with one click.
We are asking users to run the tool and include the results in the survey (see above). The information that is gathered is also designed to be helpful when providing support to a user.
You can find the Wiki Information Tool here in the Control Panel under Info. You can also drag the tool to any other wiki (including older versions of TiddlyWiki).
The Great Viral TiddlyWiki Interview Project 2010
You may also be interested in “The Great Viral TiddlyWiki Interview Project” from 2010. This was in the TiddlyWiki Classic period, when I was starting to think about TiddlyWiki 5. We invited TiddlyWiki users to join the interview project with these words:
For many people that use it. there is a distinct discovery moment when TiddlyWiki explodes in their brain. For others, it is a challenge to get their heads around TiddlyWiki at all.
This project explores how people think about TiddlyWiki by collecting together responses to a set of questions about it.
You can explore the questions and responses on this new site. There is also a forum discussion.
Project 2036
From its beginnings in 2011, TiddlyWiki 5 had the tagline “a reboot of TiddlyWiki for the next 25 years”. Back then, I was keen to communicate my commitment to keeping TiddlyWiki going as long as I could. At that point, 25 years in the other direction was 1986; not much software from that era was still in common usage apart from Unix.
We’re now 11 years until we get to that 25-year mark. What with the passage of time and other developments, this is a good time to start talking about where we want TiddlyWiki to be by that point, and to consider the longer-term future of TiddlyWiki.
There is a longer forum post about Project 2036.
Into the Future with v5.4.0
Part of Project 2036 is that we are planning a new release of TiddlyWiki in the near future that judiciously and surgically makes some narrow, technical breaks in backwards compatibility in order to allow us to bring in some of the improvements that are currently held back by concerns about backwards compatibility.
Some of the features we are planning include:
WYSIWYG editing
True single tiddler mode
Links to sections
Visual refresh, with new icons, palettes, and layout improvements
More powerful filters with multi-valued variables and comments
Improvements to bidirectional text handling
For developers, the adoption of a more modern version of JavaScript
Read the forum post announcing the plans for v5.4.0, and the project plan on GitHub.
MultiWikiServer
TiddlyWiki is growing up: the new MultiWikiServer is a more powerful and flexible server for TiddlyWiki.
MWS brings TiddlyWiki up to par with common web-based tools like WordPress or MediaWiki by supporting multiple wikis and multiple users at the same time. The architecture is based on combining “bags” of tiddlers according to a “recipe” to make an editable TiddlyWiki. This architecture allows code and data to be shared, combined, and reused. Extensive security capabilities give fine-grained access control that spans fully public to totally private.
MultiWikiServer is not part of v5.4.0, and is currently intended to work with both v5.3.x and v5.4.x versions of TiddlyWiki. It can be run locally on your own machine or hosted with a cloud service provider.
The most important change since MWS first started development in early 2024 is that Arlen Beiler has stepped up as project lead. Arlen is an experienced developer who has been contributing to TiddlyWiki for 15 years.
Arlen has made impressive progress working towards a v2.0 release of MWS. Find out more at the dedicated website mws.tiddlywiki.com and follow the development of MWS on GitHub.
Get Involved
TiddlyWiki is built, maintained, and supported entirely by volunteers from all over the world. We’ve got big plans for the future, and there is always a lot to do.
We need your help. You don’t need to be a software developer in order to contribute to the project. There are many other skills that are very valuable to us: writing and documentation, illustration, project management, product management, infrastructure operations, translation, and on, and on.
Another way that you can help is by supporting TiddlyWiki financially.
TiddlyWiki depends on you just as much as you depend on TiddlyWiki. You can show that you care by getting involved.
Best wishes
Jeremy.
