(photo by Gisela Giardino's Photos)

Gustaf has been adding new features, fixing bugs and updating xowiki at such a dizzying pace that it's hard to keep up with all the cool and nifty features.

One feature that I caught up with recently while working on a project is prototypes.

If you've been using xowiki for a while, I'm sure you're wondering how and why the en:index page keeps coming back even after you've deleted it. The answer is xowiki prototypes.

You can find the prototype for the index page along with some others in packages/xowiki/www/prototypes.

So how can prototypes be helpful to you. Let me count the ways ...

1. You can create default pages that are created on demand just like en::index. No more worrying about wiki users accidentally deleting a critical page because they will always be regenerated.
2. Prototypes are also capable of generating dynamic content. Just check out the CGI.page  file in the portlets folder.
3. If you run multiple subsites with multiple instances of xowiki, you can use prototypes to create default pages. Say for example each wiki instance needs to have a "credits" page. It would be as easy as creating a file credits.page in the portlets folder and copying how index.page does it
   

I'm sure there are more creative uses for xowiki prototypes. Can you think of more ?