MindTouch_vertical

Aaron FulkersonThe famous geekapalooza conference “AUSTIN” Interactive is on the horizon and I have an extra ticket I want to give away. Additionally, I have $50 Amazon Gift Cards and boxes full of MindTouch tshirts I’d like to dole out as well. For the lucky winner of the “AUSTIN” Interactive Conference pass, priced at about $1,000, I’ll even up the ante by buying you a beverage of your choosing in Austin as I’ll be in attendance with some other MindTouchers.

You’re probably asking yourself right now: how do I win? It’s easy and I don’t want it to take more than 5-10 minuntes. Just follow these three easy steps:
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Note: If the headline above doesn’t make sense to you – congratulations, you’ve never had to deal with DITA, which means developing content for the web probably isn’t your thing. Keep reading anyway, it’s pretty good writing.

The keystone of both MindTouch Technical Communications Suite and the MindTouch Social Documentation Solution is the Intelligent Documentation Framework (IDF). IDF was born out of the need to give technical communicators an easier way to assemble, reference and re-use their content. For readers, IDF provides an automated easy-to-use navigation that we’re so used to experiencing online. IDF is a technology/methodology hybrid, designed to deliver the fastest route to content authoring as well as the most efficient path to content discovery.

Sound familiar, TechComms? These are the same concepts that DITA set out to accomplish. However, a funny thing happened on the way to the future. DITA became a viable standard. But it also got really hard to use and follow. Ok, maybe it’s not funny, but it’s true. So true, in fact, many technical communicators are looking to alternatives. I won’t name names, but a very well known technical communicator (hint: that person is on this list) once said “I’d love a tool that allowed me to do DITA, without it being DITA”.

The Present: Knock knock.

The Future: Who’s there?

The Present: IDF.

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This past week, MindTouch announced the newest addition of our product portfolio – the Social Documentation Solution (SDS). SDS is an integrated set of easy to deploy, easy to use, and highly engaging tools for successfully launching a turnkey documentation community in minutes.

We already know that strategic content can be used to create high traffic online properties, which drive revenue and contribute to better customer service and lowered support costs. SDS is targeting the innovative companies that want to take their content to the next level, by creating highly engaged communities around their online documentation.

Technical documentation has become a strategic tool for marketing teams, community managers, user assistance teams, and product evangelists. SDS was designed with these use cases in mind.

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This post comes courtesy of Craig Box, an illustrious member of the MindTouch Community. You can follow Craig here on Twitter. Thanks for the continued support and contributions Craig!

These days, every web site wants you to create an account with them, and because we’re all very security conscious we use a different password for each site we visit. Tracking so many passwords is hard! If you’re trying to get people to contribute to your intranet or extranet, you want to remove as many barriers to entry as possible.

For people with an existing local source of user accounts, MindTouch comes with many different authentication providers, including LDAP/Active Directory, Moodle, Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. What it was missing, however, was a good solution for OpenID.

If you’re still not familiar with OpenID — “a safe, faster, and easier way to log in to web sites” — what you really need to know that you now only need one password for one web site, which is enabled as an OpenID provider. You almost certainly have an OpenID available to you already, if you choose to use it – big names operating an OpenID provider include Google, Yahoo, AOL, Flickr, MySpace and WordPress.com.

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We are set. MindTouch is again participating in OSCON in Portland, OR. Drop by our booth in the expo hall or join us at our Birds of a Feather networking session. At either venue you will have the opportunity to meet many others just like you who are interested in everything MindTouch. With the upcoming release of MindTouch 2010 we will have plenty to discuss. We are looking forward to hearing your ideas for making MindTouch an even greater product.

If you are planning to attend OSCON make sure you stop by our booth and say hello. Those who attend our Birds of a Feather networking session will receive an exclusive shirt!

Stay tuned as we will post more information soon but we are excited to co-sponsor a party with the LinuxFund.

P.S. I will be attending the Community Leadership Summit 2010 the weekend just before OSCON. Here I will be speaking about some of my past experiences building and managing communities. Look me up if you are there.

See you soon.

MindTouch recently identified a security issue that, under certain server configurations, could cause administrative credentials to be disclosed. Our engineering team has confirmed the issue and released a hotfix to remediate this issue for all versions supported by MindTouch. We have also issued an incremental release (9.08.3) which contains this security patch. If you are running an older version of MindTouch, we have also provided patch files if you feel a major upgrade is too risky. Detailed instructions on how to patch your systems can be found here.

It is imperative that you update your MindTouch installs immediately. We urge you to take a proactive approach in applying this patch, which should take no longer than ten minutes.

MindTouch places a great emphasis on the security of the platform, and will continue to improve on our release processes to diminish the likelihood of these types of issues.

For our OnDemand and Cloud customers, your sites were upgraded during the emergency maintenance window last week, and you need to take no further action.


Minneopa State ParkPhoto by Jon Mierow

The latest major release, MindTouch 2009 SP1, is now available! This release, available as part of our Minneopa family of releases, can be retrieved from our downloads page.

This release contains lots of goodies -as a part of MindTouch’s Collaborative Knowledge Base launch, the Minneopa release contained the content moderation capabilities. This feature allows multiple users to collaborate on a draft copy of a live page, which is then vetted by a moderator before it is published back into the live version of the site. Find out more about the KB solution which contains this module.

The editor received some love from us during this release, with the addition of some more FCKeditor plug-ins which help support more advanced content features. We’ve added definition list support inside the editor through an additional plug-in, as well as more table editing support (sortable tables, one click table creation, and better table settings). Find out more about our editor updates.

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MindTouch 9.02.4, the latest incremental release for the MindTouch Lyons family of releases is now available for all open source and commercial deployments.

This release, which contains 14 bugfixes, should be considered as a high-priority update, as it contains critical fixes for two bugs that could cause data-loss; one which involves redirect pages, and the other which involves file revisions.

With this release, there’s now one change to the API that may affect applications built on top of the MindTouch platform. Bug #6560 prevents access to the POST:users feature without an API key – this is to prevent spammers from programatically hitting the API and creating fake users. If your application is utilizing POST:users, you will have to update your application to send in an API key (or admin credentials).

For savvy Linux users of MindTouch, you may have noticed that there was never a MindTouch 9.02.3 release. This was intentional – MindTouch 9.02.3 was the basis of our MindTouch 2009 for Windows release and did not contain enough critical bugfixes to warrant repackaging. When you download MindTouch 9.02.4, you’ll also get the MindTouch 9.02.3 bugfixes as well.

Check out the bugfix list, and download MindTouch 9.02.4 today! Got feedback? Drop by the forum thread for 9.02.2.

While the MindTouch RESTful IPA isn’t quite ready, we did manage to package up MindTouch Deki 8.08.2! MindTouch Deki 8.08.2 is a security/stabilization update to the Kilen Woods release – check out the changelog to view the fixes that are a part of this release.

Check out the release notes page for more info.

If you’re curious what else we’re cooking up, check out the upcoming Lyons release notes page – there’s a lot of cool stuff in there!

Our Kilen Woods release, with all of its sweeping changes, has been well-received! However, there were a few bugs that crept in, which we’ve now resolved with the availability of the MindTouch Deki Kilen Woods 8.08.1 release. This is a security/stabilization release, and should be considered a must-upgrade for anybody running 8.08.

To get a full list of bug fixes in 8.08.1, check out our release notes page. As always, VM users can simply run /usr/bin/updateWiki.sh to upgrade your environments; non-VM users can follow our upgrade instructions. For new users, check out our downloads page to see all your package options!