A question about upgrading TiddlyWiki

#1

A recent thread (Groundhog day: What about Cardo?) made me go to https://tiddlywiki.com/#Upgrading and read it one more time.

https://tiddlywiki.com/upgrade contains the upgrader to the latest stable release, which is great, but sometimes might feel limiting.

Take the Cardo thread example above. Quote:

it stopped working with newer versions of TiddlyWiki

So I assume if somebody takes the Cardo wiki from Cardo — A TiddlyWiki for Getting Stuff Done Click to Get Cardo and runs it through the updater, the resulting wiki won’t work. Which makes me wonder, is there somewhere a full public list of updaters, one for each stable release of TiddlyWiki? Or a copy-pasteable command line incantation to generate all the updater versions from the TiddlyWiki Git repository? This could prove useful to somebody trying to revive a legacy wiki, by helping to narrow down the focus area. Having a list of updaters starting with version 5.1.19 and ending with latest 5.3.8, one could apply the Bisection (software engineering) - Wikipedia approach and in a few steps find the exact offending TiddlyWiki version that broke Cardo.

#2

If you go to tiddlywiki.com and type in “Release” you get a long list of Releases and you may have to scroll down. I am not sure if this answers your question. :grinning:

Your suggestion sounds like a good idea. I have not done so yet.

#3

This rather complements it, since a brief release changelog is always useful as first read before diving into code diffs. Yet I don’t see how it answers my question. Take https://tiddlywiki.com/#Release%205.2.0 for example. It’s a long tiddler and I skimmed through it but I don’t see it linking to the upgrade page for that version. I have searched the tiddler page for “update” and “upgrade”, but found nothing relevant. If you had Cardo and wanted to upgrade it to 5.2.0 to see if it works, how’s that page useful?

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#4

You might want to check https://tiddlywiki.com/archive/, which has a list of all releases from v5.1.0 (20-Sept-2014) through v5.3.8 (07-Aug-2025).

Each release has a link to a “complete” version (i.e., including all tiddlers and documentation), and an “empty” version (just the TWCore tiddlers and shadows). However, it doesn’t include the corresponding updater for each release.

Nonetheless, the archived “empty” versions can still be useful for identifying which TWCore release caused a plugin to break.

  • Begin by downloading the “empty” for the last known working release and import/install the plugin(s) you need, and then test to confirm that it still works in that version.
  • Then, repeat the process with progressively newer releases until the plugin fails.
  • Once you’ve identified the release that triggers the problem, you can try to compare it with the immediately preceding release to determine which TWCore shadow tiddlers have changed and thus narrow down the culprit.

Sure… this process can be really tedious, but it might be the only way to identify the cause, especially when trying to “revive a legacy wiki” that might not have been actively maintained and upgraded for a very long time.

Good luck!

-e

#5

There’s also GH pages archives:

But you’ll have to find the files from there, based on releases dates…

Fred

#6

The links in the Version column of that table are all broken (404).

Fortunately, the Empty and Complete links for each version are functional and the workflow that you suggest (starting from the Empty wiki and importing into it) looks like a fair alternative to a straight upgrade of the legacy wiki.

#7

I just tried the drag upgrade, and seems it works fine. No red errors.

If you want old version, tiddlywiki - npm has all legacy versions, and just use node to start it.

#8

That assumption seems to be wrong.

  • I did download the cardo.html wiki from the link
  • I did open https://tiddlywiki.com/upgrade
  • I did drag cardo.html onto the upgrader
  • I did save the upgrade.html → renamed it to cardo-new.html
  • I did open the new wiki → OK
  • I did open all dashboards → seems to be OK

It seems cardo.html was / is a very well crafted edition. I did not expect it to work over 2 major version updates.

Edit: I was wrong. There is a problem with New items. The edit-toolbar buttons do not work anymore :confused: So it needs some work after updating

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