MindTouch.com is now powered by MindTouch Deki Wiki. Well, mostly anyway. I still have to move a couple pages over.  Go to www.mindtouch.com. What you’ll find is a more engaging and significantly more aesthetically pleasing homepage. The new MindTouch.com homepage is a major improvement both in visual appeal and in function. This was all achieved very quickly by using Deki Wiki as a kind of social/collaborative content management system. As a designer, in the past, I’ve struggled with other CMS to get them to present content just how I want it. I’m very particular. So, at first I was a little concerned about using Deki Wiki as a content management. It’s surprisingly awesome. We can edit content directly with the WYSIWYG editor or use the HTML editor for more advance edits, I’m able to easily embed flash, customize CSS, provide JavaScript, Forms, etc. And it’s all automatically versioned! Not just the pages, but the files I attach too. For example, I attach all my JavaScript source files, images, and Flash files to keep these versioned too. All the files I use throughout the site (swf, zip, doc, png, gif, js) are easily attached and versioned! No more FTP, SCP, or clunky CMS file upload forms.

 If you haven’t already, open www.mindtouch.com in another tab. What you see is a “CMS” skin I built in a couple hours using the Deki Wiki “Base” skin template. If you were logged in this is what it would look like to you:

As you can see, there’s a lot you’re not seeing. I didn’t bother making the site administration and editing tools pretty because it’s only all of us at MindTouch who can login and admin the site. I’ve highlighted a few key points in this screenshot. A site admin can edit the page, or as section, browse all pages, and view all versions of a given page or files. Not shown here is the comments. I found these to be very valuable while working on the site. Aaron and I often exchange comments about pages using the page level comments. This feature has been very helpful.

Let’s talk about the home page for a moment.  The first thing you’ll like notice is the new flash demo space I built. I wanted to highlight some key features of Deki Wiki without taking up a lot of screen real estate so I used Flash. Yes, I know it’s not open and free. Aaron gave me a hard time about this, but it is effective. I broke the features into 4 key categories: Install, Use, Manage, and Embed. Each category shows a brief animation detailing Deki Wiki features and displaying corresponding screen shots. In addition to the flash demo we have added the “What’s being said” section that scrolls through a number of different reviews about Deki Wiki. I did this with a little JavaScript. Lastly I exposed an RSS feed from the MindTouch blog to show the latest news, events, and updates dynamically as posts occur. Using Deki Wiki didn’t just make this all easy, it actually made things that are normally really tedious and time consuming quick and fun.

The key features that have just been great are the full XHTML/CSS/JavaScript support. There is no way I could get by on just wikitext. The built-in scripting language for creating dynamic pages from feeds or content in the wiki. Page versioing. File versioning. Search. Commenting. I was skeptical at first. I was afraid Deki Wiki would limit my freedom to implement designs of my choosing. However, I found that using Deki Wiki as a content management system made my life a lot easier and in many cases fun.

categories: MindTouch |