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One of the best parts about MindTouch Deki is its extensibility. There are many avenues experienced and novice developers can take in order to integrate new functionality into MindTouch Deki. From native compiled C# extensions to remote XML-RPC extensions, the possibilities for adding new Deki functionality is only limited by the imagination of a developer. Going forward, I’m going attempt writing mini-tutorials showing you just how easy it is to “develop on the platform” and get your developer juices flowing.

While using Deki, and in my own travels of our forums, I’ve noticed that users want to search. More so, they want to power search. Often times, as a UI developer, we don’t have enough hours in the day to implement all the functionality that Deki’s REST-based API exposes. The search API, powered by Lucene, supports many different modifiers for winnowing and expanding search results, however, the UI purports that a user should type those in manually. Ergo, a good excuse to prototype an advanced search extension with DekiScript and JavaScript.

After a few hours of hackery, I came up with the MindTouch Deki Advanced Search extension. It uses JavaScript to generate a Lucene query string from form inputs and DekiScript to fetch search results. All in all, the longest part of writing the extension was this blog post and the associated tutorial. Without boring the non-developers much more, I conclude with a link to the complete tutorial and extension. There you can find the full writeup on how the extension was built and how you can use it on your own Deki.

Keep a lookout for more “developing on the platform.” The next installment promises to utilize DekiScript content transformations; powerful and, mostly, untapped functionality. /end cliffhanger