Our organization is developing a wiki-based protein annotation system TOPSAN  (www.topsan.org) as a new communication channel for discovering and disseminating information about protein structures determined by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) funded Protein Structure Initiative (PSI). We initially developed our system using the Jotspot wiki, platform. However, after Jotspot was acquired by Google, they discontinued support of structured data and API capabilities - two core features essential for TOPSAN. Structured data is required for the large quantity of protein pages that contain formatted data. API access is required to generate, update, and retrieve content.

Consequently, we decided to migrate our content to a new wiki platform. There are many competing wiki platforms but we  chose MindTouch for several key features they offered: API access and libraries, templates, open source code, dedicated support packages, and ease-of-use WYSIWYG interface.

We had the privilege of meeting MindTouch’s founders, Aaron and Steve,  and share with them our vision of open collaboration in science. We were impressed with their commitment to open-source and the innovative roadmap for MindTouch. We’ve been working with MindTouch now for over 6 months and we could not be happier with their product and support. Within 3 months, we were able to port our Jotspot content and features to our MindTouch Deki site.

MindTouch helped us customize TOPSAN to better serve the needs of our community. As part of this customization, templates were utilized in designing the layout of the site. A template was created for each target area (header, sidebar, & tabbed sections) on our site where the template contains the contents to be displayed in the area. This enables us to easily modify a section’s content by simply editing its template. We have also utilized Deki’s templates to achieve structured data, however, this included a bit of custom work to hide the template calls from the user and only allow section editing rather than editing the entire page.

Rather easily, we were able to migrate our content (including users, structured content, tags, images, comments) from Jotspot to Deki site using Deki’s API libraries. This system is well designed for back-end access/control of data via the API.

MindTouch is not without their bugs, but unlike what we had experienced in the past (with other companies) they have been quick to respond to bug fixes. They are continually developing new features and have also responded quickly to our feature requests. We are continually learning the powerful features of Deki as we continue to innovate our TOPSAN platform.

If you would like to learn more about us, we were recently featured in a MindTouch blog!

Thank you MindTouch team!

categories: Guest Blogger, MindTouch