By now our loyal readers are likely sick of hearing me talk about the latest release of Deki Wiki :-), but I’m obliged to thank all the pubs and blogs that covered our announcement and to return some link-love. The response is nothing short of remarkable. In no particular order, here it goes:
The must read post of all the coverage, and there was a lot of quality coverage, is Dr. Dobbs. I say this only because it’s the most technical post and most of our readers are technical. I summarize here, but I encourage you to read the entire post:
Dr. Dobb’s | Web Oriented Architectures…and why Mozilla adopted the Deki Wiki | May 7, 2008
Steve Bjorg: Web-Oriented Architecture is an alternative to Service-Oriented Architecture. WOA is fundamentally about “open” systems that communicate over “open” and established protocols and formats. In WOA, HTTP takes center-stage as the communication protocol between applications and web-services. Beyond that, the exchange format is also web-centric and is often XHTML, RSS, RDF, or other such formats. In WOA, web-services embrace the same technological design principles that web-applications have been following for years: communication between services is stateless, formats are open and extensible, and data exchanges are cacheable. All desirable properties for creating large scale, ad-hoc networks of connected, heterogenous web-services.
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Mike Shaver: … We were looking for a system that would give us the tools to combine and “remix” those data sources creatively, and Deki Wiki is designed with exactly that goal in mind.
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Because Deki Wiki is designed as a distributed application, it will be quite straightforward for us to integrate content and data from other parts of our world, without creating a maintenance nightmare by hacking on the core code or trying to program to underpowered APIs. More than any other Wiki system we looked at, Deki Wiki feels designed to be extended as a platform for web applications and we’re really looking forward to having that power available to our community.
Mike Shaver: Mozilla is a large project, and our Developer Center alone has hundreds of editors collaborating in more than a dozen languages to create tens of thousands of pages of content. With the Jay Cooke release of Deki Wiki, we have more powerful localization tools than ever before, and great support for working with many different types of web content at our significant scale.
You can get started quickly with the VM image that’s provided by Mindtouch, and whipping up a new extension or integration point is easy enough that even a Chief Evangelist can do it.
Mark Hinkle (Mhinkle), from Socialized Software (and Zenoss), provides analysis and commentary on the latest release:
Microsoft Ex-Pats Developing Open Source Software Outside of Redmond | Socialized Software
Rather than striving to be an all-in-one solution Deki Wiki boasts a robust web services API that allows for integration between other applications. Already Deki Wiki supports authentication via LDAP and Active Directory as well as authentication systems from popular open source content management systems like Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla!.
Today was the release of MIndTouch’s v8.05 (codenamed Jay Cooke) which was largely driven by requirements from the Mozilla Foundation (who will be relaunching their developer community using Deki Wiki). I like to see open source projects use open source software when they get the chance. Sometimes I think we do that because of solidarity among free software developers. However, in the case of Deki Wiki I think that it’s safe to say that Deki Wiki is not only open source, but also best of breed. I have raved about Deki Wiki before but this release has some very cool new features. Through web services you can enable real time chat, embed Google spreadsheets, query databases, and include interactive maps from Google and Windows Live.
Kristen Nicole of Mashable provides coverage of the new release. As always, her assessment is insightful and thorough.
Mozilla’s Tower of Babel, Powered by Mindtouch
Mindtouch’s Deki Wiki is among the most used for enterprise solutions because of its ability to provide highly customized options that meet variant business needs. The result is a consumer-facing page that often bears little resemblance to a wiki at all. And with the never-ending list of included programs, plug-ins and options, the combinations available for clients can pretty much offer whatever it is you need.
Mozilla agrees, and has selected Mindtouch to power its new Developer Community. As a result of the partnership between Mindtouch and Mozilla, a new version of the Deki Wiki has been released, to meet Mozilla’s demands. That’s good for you, because there are some very handy features involved in this latest version, entitled the Deki Wiki “Jay Cooke” v8.05.
The most notable new feature, in my opinion, is the new polygot capability, which provides support for all the major languages out there. It’s a virtual tower of Babel, where every user can experience the wiki in its entirety, in their native language. The language is set in user preferences, and content, including searched content, is served up accordingly.
The ever vigilant and intelligent Marshall Kirkpatrick jumps in with his assessment of our latest innovations:
MindTouch Goes Polyglot, Gets Nod From Mozilla - ReadWriteWeb
MindTouch also announced that Deki Wiki has been chosen as the new
framework to power the Mozilla Developer Community site, some great validation for a company that often seems to stand so far out on the bleeding edge that it could make potential users feel uneasy.
Ordinarily we wouldn’t write here about new versions of software, but this internationalization seems like a great fit for our international audience. MindTouch is far more than just a wiki, it’s a CMS with extensive application and mashup support. We wrote in January, for example, about the company’s integration with one of our favorite services, Dapper. Deki Wiki was born as a Mediawiki fork, but those roots are barely recognizable anymore under several years of powerful innovation.
Also covering the announcement is VentureBeat, which has been increasingly expanding it’s coverage with the addition of the seasoned Dean Takahashi from the San Jose Mercury.
MindTouch releases new version of multi-language software » VentureBeat
[With Deki Wiki, users] can integrate multiple languages into a single site, rather than create a separate site for each language. In addition, users visiting the site can search across all languages, with the search results prioritized to that user’s language.
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Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, plans on using Deki Wiki for the Mozilla Development Center, the site where Mozilla manages its community of developers. That’s important for open-source developers such as Mozilla, which has thousands of developers around the world.
CenterNetworks, the up and coming media star also provides brief coverage:
MindTouch DekiWiki Revolutionizes Multilingual Content Management | CenterNetworks
MindTouch is announcing the latest release of their Deki Wiki (8.05) open source enterprise collaboration and integration platform today. I’ve embedded a short video below that reviews the new features. MindTouch is also announcing that their platform has been selected to power the upcoming re-launch of their Mozilla Developer Community.
The major update to Deki Wiki in this new version is a new “polyglot” feature. MindTouch describes polygot, “will allow Mozilla to host all languages as a single site. Now language can be specified by sections and pages thereby automatically adapting the user interface of Deki Wiki to the appropriate language. Also, users may search across all languages and search results are prioritized by the user’s default language.”
Mary Fallon from DEMO.com, a person whom I enjoy talking tech with because her experience always provides a valuable perspective, gives her angle on the recent news:
MindTouch introduces 16 language content management system | DEMO.com
MindTouch, whose open source collaborative software tools let enterprises manage and share information, today released the world’s first polygot content management system that helps software developers create Web applications hosting 16 major spoken languages including English, Japanese, and Russian on a single site.
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“It’s really bleeding edge,” Fulkerson said. “Now it’s easier than ever to create content, systems automation, dynamic reports, and situational applications.”
Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s chief evangelist, said Mozilla chose MindTouch Deki Wiki after extensive testing of alternatives. “Mozilla believes in the power of the Web to bring people together in wonderfully collaborative ways and MindTouch Deki Wiki’s extensibility and flexible architecture will allow us bring more of this to our developer community,” Shaver said. “The opportunity to easily create our own tools and extensions on top of Deki’s extensive API is sure to inspire some great improvements from our community.”
Shockingly, my blog post made Techmeme! I love Techmeme. I would have thought some of these other great articles/posts would have made Techmeme before my write-up, but hey: yay me!
Also, Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcellerator, an RIA development platform, had some very kind words about MindTouch, an opinion on the significance of the release, and some criticism about our release naming convention.
OK, putting aside the silly release naming convention — this is a pretty big announcement for the really cool open source wiki provider, MindTouch.
MindTouch has continued to gain tons of traction and I hear, from one of our common advisors, that they’re getting a lot of downloads on a daily basis. This is a great thing and today’s announcement is important for several reasons.
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I expected some comments or questions about the new version numbering. We’ve explained it, in part, elsewhere, but allow me to elaborate. We give every release the code name of a state park in Minnesota in descending alphabetical order. This code name is used by the community and the development team to reference the release independent of the release date/number. As of this release we’ve changed the release numbering scheme to one that’s similar to Ubuntu’s. The release number is the release year + . + month; therefore, “Jay Cooke” v8.05 was released May, 2008. The next release is “Killen Woods” and will likely be v8.07.
The coverage of our announcement today is nothing short of remarkable. Thank you all who covered it. We promise to keep innovating and outpacing the competition to give you more great stuff to write about.
Props to future-works for helping to get the word out. Specifically, Miiko Mentz, who is wicked smart, and Allison Bethurem deserve credit for their hard work. I think our most recent social media press release has been especially well received. We’re putting to practice things many others only talk about.
Stay tuned for more news from MindTouch. We’ve got more major announcements on the way.
