I need your help. Please share with me your stories and testimonials about Deki Wiki. The corporate website, www.MindTouch.com, will be going through a transformation in the next few months. To date the MindTouch corporate website has been very much focused on those who matter most to MindTouch: the geeks who deploy our software. This isn't going to change dramatically, but we will be adding a new layer that is really about communicating to the business folks and CIOs. The geeks are still what matter most to us, after all pretty much everyone at MindTouch holds a degree in Computer Science (including me–Go Tarheels!), but with this new business and solutions focused messaging MindTouch will be giving you techies the tools you need to sell the executives within your corporation on MindTouch support and products. I may as well mention that we'll also be announcing some new products in the next several months. If you're an active Gardener you likely already have an inkling of what these new products are.

Like I said, I need your help. MindTouch needs your help. As we improve the site messaging and communicate our new products and existing services your stories are very valuable and important. I want to know what you think about MindTouch Deki Wiki. How you are using Deki Wiki. What do you find most valuable about our software? Do you have an interesting story? Currently, there are more than a hundred thousand people who use Deki Wiki. We need your stories and insight. We will be developing new case studies. Our existing case studies are very old. Those who participate in these case studies will likely get press. Obviously we want these case studies to be about paying customers, but if you have an amazing Deki Wiki story and you are not a paying customer we will consider you for inclusion. If you are interested in participating in a MindTouch case study please contact me directly ASAP.

Aaron R. Fulkerson
AaronF [rhymes with bat] MindTouch.com

555 West Beech Street #501
San Diego, CA 92101

USA

Business

619.316.7487 cell

619.895.7495 1102 work

If you have a testimonial please email me these or you may contribute to the OpenGarden testimonials page. I sync these with the MindTouch.com testimonials page regularly. Here are some recently submitted testimonials:

Garland Baker, Costa Rica Expertise LLC
"We have been searching for a functional and 'fun' knowledge base for a long time and finally with Deki Wiki we have found one."

Phil Ten, See Clic
"I installed Deki Wiki a few weeks ago and I want to congratulate your team for this wonderful software  :)  Great product! Thanks to DekiWiki, now, I can organize, save and, most important, find my notes and files when I need them. I previously tried many other solutions, none have worked for me.
Thanks a lot !!!"

Trevor Rabie, SATNETS
"Your software is absolutely fantastic - I love it."

Jeff, A Call Center Project Manager from Southfield, MI
"I simply can not find the right words to describe how excited I am about Deki Wiki. Words and phases like: 'wow, cool, sweet,' and 'freekin a' kept coming to mind. However, they may not be the most elegant response you have gotten so far…

…I was searching for an easy knowledge base, wiki, or content management system that I could use to fit my needs. I found, of course, Deki Wiki. I downloaded the vmware appliance and it rocked right out of the box. Without any headache or pain, it was up and running. the interface is intuitive, and it could not be easier to use."

Gary Kirkpatrick, GSK Services
"Your software is amongst the best I’ve used in a very long time. It just plain works!"

Wow, these are wonderful. Thank you all. These kinds of statements mean a lot to all of us at MindTouch and these are very valuable to us as a company. Of course, all input is valuable, it doesn't have to be positive. Your criticism and opinions have already helped MindTouch to develop the product that you love. Now I'm asking that you help us develop the messaging and case studies that will aid MindTouch in selling support for this product. I guess you can think of this as an experiment in Open Marketing. As we develop the corporate website please give us feedback in the same way you have as we've developed Deki Wiki. With your input I'm confident MindTouch will continue to set a new standard for success in open source business.

In summary, send me your testimonials, stories, and notify me if you're willing to participate in a case study. A case study will involve you being interviewed. It will not take much of your time. Your name, company, and story will be highlighted in the case study section of MindTouch.com and MindTouch will do a press release with some of these case studies.

PayPal is now integrated with Deki Wiki through the new PayPal Extension. The extension allows you to insert a Buy Now or Donate buttons on any wiki page.

1) To use the extension add it your Service Management console in the Control Panel by following the instructions here.

2) Once added you need to add your email under the Config section like this:

3) Next add the products you want to sell by adding their name and price in the Config section like this:

This ensures that no one can edit a wiki page and change the cost of your products.

4) Once you have this setup then make sure the service is enabled and click update service

5) Now you can go to any wiki page and type in a script like this: {{paypal.buynow(”wiki”)}} and you will get a button in your page like this:

If you want the donation button, use the following script: {{paypal.donate(”wiki”)}} and you will get this:

If you want to use your own button you can easily supplement it within the script like this: {{paypal.donate(”wiki”, “url of button“)}}

Adding extensions to Deki Wiki is easy and fun. Click here to learn more about how to create your own Deki Wiki Extension.

Deki Wiki 1.8.3c is now available for public consumption! This release is primarily a stabilization release: 40 bugs were fixed for this release, which includes many speed optimizations to help you squeeze out as much performance from your hardware.

An important note for our VM users: Updating to this version will require you to run two commands instead of one:

/usr/bin/updateWiki.sh -d
/usr/bin/updateWiki.sh

Please be sure to run both of these queries to successfully receive updates.

Barring any issues, our next release will be Deki Wiki 1.9.0, which is scheduled for release in mid-February.

As always, feel free to drop in our forums if you’re having any issues.

Deki Wiki 1.8.3c: Download the source or read the release notes

P.S. We will be deploying 1.8.3c to our Wik.is community tonight, so expect about half-hour of downtime as we work to continually improve your wikis

Have you heard of Dapper? If not be sure to take a look at www.Dapper.net. Most of all, be certain to make it to DapperCamp on February 5-6 in San Franciso. It's a free conference and promises to be full of interesting topics. Also, MindTouch is a sponsor of this event and Steve and I will be there to show off some cool mashups in Deki Wiki that we've created with the help of Dapper.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at RW/W has written a couple of times about Dapper. And I’ve been a big fan of Dapper for sometime since discovering them in early 2006. I first meet Jon Aizen, one of the founders of Dapper, at the Web 2.0 Expo in 2006. As evidence of my enthusiasm for this company and their technology I submit to you this picture that was taken minutes after my initial meeting with Jon:

MindTouch's Deki Wiki is an exceptional point application for collaboration and file sharing. It does this better than any other similar collaboration or wiki product and this is being established by the 1,000+ votes of confidence cast daily in the form of downloads. However, Deki Wiki delivers a lot more value than that provided by any other collaboration point application because it's also an integration and mashup platform. Deki Wiki allows users, even not particularly technical users, to hook in external applications, services, databases, APIs from any vendor and create composite applications, which are often referred to as mashups or business user applications. With this in mind it makes perfect sense why we at MindTouch love technologies like those provided by Dapper. In fact, in a recent demo of the Deki Wiki 1.8.3 release I show how with Dapper integration Deki Wiki users can query the Internet like a database and create interesting dynamic reports and mashups. Stop by DapperCamp next week and we'll be happy to show you other ways Deki Wiki can provide an integration platform for your enterprise or online community site.

Update: SteveB just completed some docs and demos at the DapperCamp Wiki.

Among the many strong suits of Deki Wiki is the ability to make virtually any application/widget reusable. All it takes is a few lines of Deki Script, and voilà, you have your own custom extension that others can use.

A perfect example of this occurred a week ago when I was working on implementing a new feature management application for the growth and development of Deki Wiki using FeVote. Initially I embedded the script onto a wiki page just to see how it worked. Once I was able to confirm that the application displayed nicely in a wiki page I decided to take the next step and add it as an extension.

The reason why I wanted to add it as an extension was because it made it much easier to invoke the board and to change parameters such as the name of the board, size, etc.

The writing of the script was very simple following the instructions here.

Here are a couple of tips for writing, testing, and implementing your extension:

1. Make sure you check that the script can be copy and pasted in a normal wiki page first. If this doesn’t work then there may be an issue with the script itself.
2. Use previous examples of similar scripts - starting off I always try to compare the outcome of my extension to a similar extension to make sure I am on the right track.
3. Make sure when you setup the service to add debug as a config value as this will allow the service to refresh every time so that you don’t have to login to the control panel anytime you make changes to the XML file

I was able to add the FeVote extension in a matter of minutes and had time to throw together another one.

Here is the documentation for the two extensions I wrote: FeVote and Add This Social Bookmarking
Feel free to use the extensions I created as examples to compare to your extensions.

MindTouch signs innovative Spanish VAR Tinval Sistemes to expand its business in Spain. Tinval is a consultant and system integrator focusing on Microsoft SharePoint, knowledge management and collaboration projects using the latest Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and open source technologies to bring more value with less cost for its commercial and government customers. It has already deployed two major projects with Deki Wiki. One is an R&D, business intelligence and innovation intranet for a textile company. The other is a public information and citizen feedback portal for a local government agency.

“MindTouch Deki Wiki is a wiki-centric social enterprise platform that can power enterprise collaboration, Web publishing and online communities, ” said Jordi Raich, Tinval’s owner and COO. “That unique combination of features combined with its powerful application integration and mashup capability enable our customers to accomplish many important applications very cost effectively.”

A minor release for Deki Wiki (1.8.3b) was posted today. The list of fixed bugs is available on our release page.

This release contains mostly bug fixes, but also contains one new feature: automatic version pinging. When a release is posted, you will see a message in your control panel notifying you as such. We’ve also embedded a RSS feed which will contain technical news from MindTouch - staying on top of Deki Wiki updates has never been easier!

Download Deki Wiki. 1.8.3b source or check out the release notes.

We’d also like to thank Marc Christensen for his work on packaging a Deki Wiki RPM for OpenSuse; it was his work in identifying PHP compatibility issues with Deki Wiki (all fixed in 1.8.3b!) which helped make this RPM a reality.

MindTouch Upgrades Wiki for Mashups - SOA / Web Services - Network Computing
MindTouch has launched a new version of DekiWiki, its enterprise wiki platform. The upgrade is intended to expand the wiki beyond its current role as a content management system, making it into a full-featured application platform that can host mashups and even execute code. It also introduces new versioning features that allow several people to edit the same document simultaneously….

…Turning a wiki into a mashup platform may seem unusual for users accustomed to pure content wikis like Wikipedia. However, it makes sense from the perspective of enterprise vendors wanting to build on what is already successful. Of all technologies commonly given the Web 2.0 label, wikis are by far the most successful within enterprises, so using them as a foundation for others is almost a natural step…

It has been an exciting couple months here at MindTouch and with our recent updates to the “Fiesta” template I have some new stuff to talk about.

Fiesta is now about 2 months old and if you’ve been following or using the template I think you may be familiar with some of the new skins. As of this point Deki Wiki now has 12 fiesta skins including a wireframe skin that was designed for users to develop custom designs. Most of the initial skins consisted of different color variations whereas the newer skins have colorful scenes including photographs and illustrations.

Check out the newest skins now by updating to the latest version of Deki Wiki or you can see screen shots below:

Collaboration Loop - MindTouch Upgrades Deki Wiki
MindTouch announced an upgrade to Deki Wiki, a free scalable and programmable open source wiki and application platform. The new release includes a built-in scripting engine. It eliminates the need to use a separate programming environment to add widgets, external services, or javascript libraries to Deki Wiki. Now extensions can be developed entirely in Deki Wiki as if they were a natural part of the platform. The company’s dekiscript makes it easier for site admins to customize interaction within the wiki and external applications as well as simplifying and extending the ability to create mashups. The open source platform also offers seamless Dapper integration, providing the ability to create “dapps” that query the Internet as one giant database directly from within the wiki. This enables the ability to create new mashups that leverage web services, widgets and applications to improve how people obtain and interact with data.