RefreshSD is being hosted by Phelan at the MindTouch HQ.

Refresh San Diego is an open community of web designers, developers, and marketers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of Internet in the San Diego area. Meetings are usually the second Tuesday of each month where we discuss anything from design to marketing and everything in between. Topics that we’ll cover include: Design, Development, Marketing, Programming, Usability, Web 2.0, SEO, and more. Everyone interested in “refreshing” the Internet is welcome.

Time

Start: Jul 22 2008 - 7:00pm
End: Jul 22 2008 - 9:00pm
Timezone: Etc/GMT-7

Location

MindTouch 555 West Beech, Suite 501
San Diego, CA, 92101

See map: Google Maps

The month’s Refresh meeting will be held at MindTouch in Little Italy. This is a temporary venue due to scheduling conflicts at DT. There is some parking on the streets and we should have access to the parking in the underground lot of the MindTouch building. Call Phelan at (858) 715-0146 so we can open up the gates.

So you have a new website launch or know of one?

Bring your best or worst to the Refresh meeting and discuss with others which one’s are looking to go huge and which one’s may be doomed to fail from the start.

Anyone that wants to present your own project, please sign up here on the refresh forum. If you want feedback from other designers, marketers, programmers and users, then this is the time and place to do it.

Bring your tips, tricks, tech, questions and solutions to the meeting to learn and share with others.

This is an open discussion for designers, developers and marketers alike. Please make sure you RSVP with phelan [at] refreshsd.org.

Congratulations to Cody DeNiro, the winner of the iPod Shuffle, from the MindTouch Survey that went out in our last newsletter. Thank you for everyone who took the time to fill out the survey, the responses were great and will help us in our effort to constantly improve MindTouch Deki. If you didn’t get a chance to fill out the survey you still can by clicking here.

We always take feedback in our forums and directly through our support form.

The extension I’m going to focus on this week is the  YUI Media Player. The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Media Player is a javascript/flash application which recognizes all links to mp3 files in your web page and embeds a player into the page. This decreases the dependency of the user’s local applications to play the mp3 file along with giving a great user experience.

To install the YUI Media Player follow the instructions here. Once installed add the following code to any Deki page that has mp3s attached or linked on:

{{ yui.mediaplayer{} }}

The extension will take over from there and automatically add a play button next to your mp3 links and expand a player on the left side of the screen like the following:

To see the extension in action check out the documentation page.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact us.

Greetings all!

As just about anyone who reads this blog or has used MindTouch Deki knows, our software was developed in C# but to date has run solely on Mono inside of a Linux environment.

Well, that’s all about to change…

I’m happy announce that for the first time, MindTouch is releasing an official Windows-based beta version of MindTouch Deki. Specifically, you may now install using a MindTouch-created Microsoft Windows MSI!

Yes, believe it or not, Deki is now available as a Windows installer package. Running fully within IIS 7 and utilizing Microsoft’s .NET architecture, this early release of Deki for Windows enables Microsoft shops to preview the “connective tissue” and great wiki interface that heretofore had been available only to users in Linux or mixed environments. MindTouch and the vast number of developers who work with Deki have had marked success in coding in .NET for the Linux platform, and we are excited about where it will go from here now that we are making our open-source software available for Windows. Systems integrators and .NET developers can return to their existing customer base (and find new customers) to deliver more value by integrating Deki into Windows-based operations; now they can “add the 2.0″ to the enterprise infrastructure in the form of a collective intelligence platform atop the existing infrastructure that they’ve already deployed.

Although this is a beta release, the MindTouch team has worked hard to include all major features and functionality currently available to Deki users on Linux-based operating systems. Please report any problems or issues that you may discover either at our forums or by filing a bug. This new MindTouch Deki MSI beta supports IIS 7 on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Vista only. However, the final release of the MSI will also support IIS 6 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

So for those of you who have been waiting for a Windows version to check out MindTouch Deki… your time has arrived! Download the MindTouch Deki MSI Beta today!

The 8.05.2 release of MindTouch Deki has a many noticeable improvements, particularly regarding skinning template targeting. Additionally, 8.05.2 shipped with a fairly drastic series of updates to the most popular MindTouch Deki skinning template, Fiesta. The updates were introduced to increase skinning efficiency, to provide a better CSS file structure and to reduce the CSS filesize and load time.

Architectural Changes
Prior to 8.05.2 Fiesta utilized two main CSS files, _common.css which was located in the Fiesta directory and style.css which was located in the skins’ directory (i.e. grazing green, charcoal forest, etc). _common.css was used for all of the structural CSS (padding, width, margin, etc) and style.css was used for all of the style CSS (font, color, etc). Because each skin had its own copy of style.css there were 1,000’s of lines of CSS that were often redundant and updating a global feature involved making a change to multiple copies of style.css.

To remedy this problem I’ve added a new file called _style.css which is located in the Fiesta directory and contains all of the redundant style CSS (font, color, etc). I’ve also altered the style.css in the skins’ directory to contain only the differentiator elements such as link colors, background images etc.

Now, the skins’ style.css only contains about 400 lines of CSS as opposed to 4,000 formerly. Please refer to the Filesystem Structure documentation for more information.

Skinning Variables
Although reducing the CSS makes skinning MindTouch Deki much easier I saw another opportunity for improvement by utilizing CSS variables. By using CSS variables I was able to completely consolidate the vast majority of the skinning experience into about 30 lines. Of course you can still alter the other CSS and images as needed.

Please refer to the CSS variables documentation for more information.

Table Of Contents
One of the major frustrations of skinning Fiesta was caused by the CSS organization, or lack there of. To fix this frustration each of the primary CSS files ( _common.css, _style.css and style.css ) have been re-organized, consolidated and given a table of contents. The table of contents is structured based on the Fiesta Markup Structure and is consistent throughout each of the CSS files.

Reduced Selectors
If you attempted to skin MindTouch Deki you probably experienced some of the extremely lengthy CSS selectors. For instance elements were targeted by using the following CSS:

html body div.body div.page div.pageContentFrame {...}

Using such long selectors has proven to be heavy on the browser load time and also very cumbersome for altering. Given these reasons I’ve reduced the selectors to be similar to the following CSS:

.body .pageContentFrame {...}

By reducing the selectors I have eliminated some unnecessary CSS and also eased the maintenance process.

I hope you can benefit from the latest Fiesta updates and I will continue to improve the Fiesta skinning templates. If you’re interested in contributing please visit the Fiesta Documentation

Thanks

Damien
DamienH[at]mindtouch[dot]com

Have you ever wondered who is the best person to contact within an organization? Whether it is sales, partnership opportunities, or just trying to make a connection; the new LinkedIn extension for MindTouch Deki will help you with that.

To start follow the steps here for installing the LinkedIn extension.

Once installed you can add the name of the company you are looking for into the Extension and and find the contacts that work their. Here is an example:

Paste the following into a MindTouch Deki page(LinkedIn Extension needs to be installed first):

{{ linkedin.companyinsider("google", "noborder") }}

Once entered you will ge the following output:

You can even take it to the next step and make a dynamic form that will update the extension so you don’t have to change the code everytime. To do so you would paste the following code into your page:

 Enter the name of a company to check your insider connections:

{{ dhtml.form{inputs: [ { label: "Company", value: __request.args.company ?? "mindtouch",

field: "company" }], button: "Find", publish: page.uri} }}

Then paste the following code right after the above code:

{{linkedin.companyinsider(__request.args.company ?? "mindtouch", "noborder")}}

This will look as follows:



Now you have a dynamic field that anyone on your team can enter company information into and it will bring up details right away.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact us.

With the roll-out of MindTouch Deki “Jay Cooke” v 8.05.2 we introduced MindTouch Deki Enterprise Edition. MindTouch Deki Enterprise Edition is production ready open source software and our only platform that is stress-tested, certified and supported. MindTouch Deki Enterprise Edition includes services tailored to saving organizations time and money by helping getting projects completed securely and quickly. MindTouch is always there when you need support.

What you get with the Enterprise Edition

* 100% Open Source with Commercial Support
* Stress Tested
* Supported Builds
* Certified Scalability
* MindTouch QA Certified with Most Complete Test Coverage

When you upgrade to “Jay Cooke” v. 8.05.02 you will notice at the bottom on your wiki pages it reads, “Powered by MindTouch Deki Community Edition v.8.05.2″. You may wonder what the difference is between the two versions, all that information is available on our web site. To activate your Enterprise Edition you need to obtain an Enterprise ID. If you are a current customer you may do so by following the instructions below or contacting your sales representative. This key is provided at no cost to our existing customers but, will be required upon contacting MindTouch for future support requests.

Follow these steps in order to activate your MindTouch Enterprise Edition:

1. Upgrade your MindTouch Deki install to 8.05.2 by following the upgrade steps.
2. Once upgraded you will go to the Control Panel and click on MindTouch Deki Enterprise Edition
3. On this screen you will see an API Key, copy this and send it to support@mindtouch.com
4. A short time later an Enterprise ID will be sent back to you via email.  You will upgrade your edition by putting the supplied ID into the form and clicking “Upgrade”.
5. Once you click upgrade you will receive conformation that the upgrade has been successful!
6. Your Enterprise ID will be required when you contact MindTouch for support.

The Enterprise ID can always be referenced by going to the MindTouch Deki Enterprise Edition in the Control Panel. Once you have completed this process you are on MindTouch Deki Enterprise going forward.

If you have any questions about this upgrade or would like to become a MindTouch Deki Enterprise customer, contact sales or your support agent.

MindTouch Deki 8.05.2 is now available for download and updating from VMs; RPM packages will be ready tomorrow.

Jay Cooke State Park, the namesake of this release
Photo by Nattapol Pornsalnuwat

This release is our last minor release within the Jay Cooke family before Kilen Woods. The main driver of features for this release was the Topsan project, which is a collaborative effort to describe proteins and their functions. The most notable feature is the addition of global templates - these are Deki templates which are loaded on every page. In combination with our skin template targeting in 8.05.1, this allows you to target any part of the skin on all pages with output from DekiScript. We’ve also added more control over the default content of user and home pages - this’ll let you embed templates and more personalized content whenever somebody joins your Deki community; this is a part of a long-term effort to emphasize features which assist user adoption.

We’ve added a slew of new features for our LDAP authentication service which adds more compatibility support for systems which use LDAPS and OpenLDAP - this underscores our commitment to making it as easy as possible to bridge between your existing systems. Beta testers of the LDAP upgrades are suggested to switch their SIDs upon upgrade.

From the reported bugs by our QA team, as well as the developer community, we’ve fixed the most common regressions from 8.05.1: the inability to add templates on new pages and JavaScript output dying if the cache folder is not writable. We’ve implemented a faster diffing algorithm, which will improve the comparison times for large documents. Bundled JavaScript libraries were also updated to their latest versions (YUI 2.5.2, jQuery 1.2.6, SWFUpload 2.1.0).

8.05.2 comes with three new Fiesta skins: PRO, Maroon Flash, and MindTouch. The CSS structure for Fiesta has been greatly simplified with the usage of the CSS variables feature - this will make building new skins on top of the Fiesta platform much easier. At our upcoming DekiCon, the documentation and style refactoring done in Fiesta will be highlighted to help you design your own skin based on Fiesta.

With the release of FireFox 3, our QA team rigorously tested Deki functionality to ensure compatibility - we’re happy to report that MindTouch Deki 8.05.2 is production-ready for Firefox 3!

Read the release notes, check out the bug fix changelog, or download Deki 8.05.2 now!

This week I’m going to focus on a lesser known set of built in Meta Tag extensions for MindTouch Deki. The Meta Tag extensions allow you to add information into the header of MindTouch Deki like keywords, description, author information, and more. I’m going to focus on a couple of common use cases that Meta Tags are beneficial for:

In support I’m often asked the following question: “I want to add my site to Google Webmaster Tools but they need me to verify that I own the site.” Google gives two options to do this 1) upload an html file into the root directory or 2) add a custom Meta Tag to the site header. Uploading an html file or adding a keyword typically requires FTP or Shell access. With MindTouch Deki we simplify it by allowing you to add custom Meta tag extensions through the WYSIWYG Editor.


In the case of adding a Meta Tag so that you can have ownership of a site you would do the following:

1. Edit your MindTouch Deki HomePage and click on the Cog icon to open the Extension dialog
2. Click on Built in Functions and scroll down to meta.custom
3. The name is the meta name that Google includes, something like verify-v1
4. The content would be the long alpha numeric string from the Google code
5. Insert it and save the page, then go back to Google and verify

The actual extension will look something like this (content is skewed):

{{ meta.custom{name: "verify-v1", content: "fdshjfhdsjkhfjkdshjkfdsafkdshakfhdksa543245"} }}
 

Another good use for the Meta Tags is to add keywords and descriptions for your MindTouch Deki pages. This helps with SEO of your MindTouch Deki site. You can do so by going into the Extension dialog again through the editor and selecting meta.keywords or meta.description under the Built In category. This can be done on a per page basis.

Here is an example of a meta keyword and description DekiScript:

{{ meta.keywords{content: "blog, testing"} }}
{{ meta.description{content: "This is a test page about meta tags"} }} 

This functionality is currently available in all MindTouch Deki downloads Release 1.9.1 and higher and will be available in Wik.is after the next upgrade which will be coming out in the next couple of weeks.


To read more about the supported Meta extensions in MindTouch Deki check out the Meta Functions specs.


If you have any questions please feel free to contact us: http://wiki.mindtouch.com/support

I’m going to be blogging once a week about an Extension that is available for MindTouch Deki. The extension I’m highlighting this week is the FlowPlayer Extension.

FlowPlayer enables a user to embed FLV media into a Deki page. This will help liven up your MindTouch Deki site while allowing you to keep media relevant to your organization on your Deki site as opposed to hosting it on a third party video site.

To use the extension you would activate it first by following the install instructions. Once installed, attach an FLV file to a Deki page, copy the url for the FLV file, and then put the url in the box provided by the Extension dialog(which can be found by clicking on the Cog icon in the editor and then selecting FlowPlayer).

After installing, use the following script to see an example flv(note there is no sound with the example):

 {{ flowplayer{source: "http://wiki.developer.mindtouch.com/@api/deki/files/2989/=test.flv"} }} 

More information about FlowPlayer.
Main FlowPlayer Extension Page

If you have any questions about it please feel free to contact us.