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.
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!
We’re proud to announce the immediate availability of MindTouch Deki Jay Cooke 8.05.1 for both source and VM installs.
The final bug count was 167 (wow!), plus we made significant improvements in the performance of our application - the combination of API caching as well as third party open-source applications like eAccelerator improved performance on our test box from 1.94 req/second up to 25 req/second! A big thanks goes out to the Mozilla guys for helping out with performance tests and providing feedback on the 8.05.1 release.
As I wrote previously in the RC1 blog post, this release also contains a few features:
single sign-on utilizing Apache/IIS authentication modules (experimental) which this allows for easy integration with auth systems like NTLM #
Our next release is Killen Woods, which is slated for the middle of July. For our Wik.is users, we will be updating Wik.is with the 8.05.1 bits sometime in the next two weeks (email forthcoming).
I’m proud to announce the availability of Deki Wiki 8.05.1 RC1 today! Deki Wiki 8.05.1 is an incremental Jay Cooke release with a high focus on improving performance of Deki Wiki. Performance gains were realized primarily in the API to support the millions of pageviews per month for Mozilla’s Developer Center. All of the performance development gains are documented; check it out for details and hard numbers. On our test environment on an Amazon EC2 large instance, we saw performance gains from 8.05 up to 1200%!
Deki Wiki 8.05.1 also includes new functionality like single sign-on utilizing Apache/IIS authentication modules (experimental) which this allows for easy integration with auth systems like NTLM. Extensions now digitally sign requests to extensions, and we can finally authenticate for private RSS feeds! All Javascript libraries that are shipped with Deki Wiki were updated to their latest versions: jQuery 1.2.3, YUI 2.5.1, FCKeditor 2.6.0, and Xinha 0.95.
After consulting with you guys, we’ve decided to focus our attention on FCKeditor as our chosen editor. Starting with the Killen Woods (8.07) release, FCKeditor will be our default editor inside Deki Wiki - this release further stabilized FCKeditor to be used in production systems for aggressive bug testing before we switch it on by default.
The release notes for this release are a part of the Jay Cooke page; and as always, the download is available at SourceForge. Try it out now and let us know if there are any problems before the final release next week!
Since the 8.05 Jay Cooke VM release, Debian has announced several security updates which affect the Deki Wiki VM. Because reading the debian-security-announce mailing list probably isn’t your idea of fun (though I think it is), we’ve started tracking the Deki Wiki specific updates on the DekiWiki VM Security Updates page.
One of the latest vulnerabilities is particularly annoying. According to DSA-1576-1:
The recently announced vulnerability in Debian’s openssl package (DSA-1571-1, CVE-2008-0166) indirectly affects OpenSSH. As a result, all user and host keys generated using broken versions of the openssl package must be considered untrustworthy, even after the openssl update has been applied.
To apply the security fix for openssl and openssh you’ll need run the following commands (as root) apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client
This will regenerate a secure host key for you. The next time you log in via SSH you will most likely receive the following error message:
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
52:8e:93:04:64:a5:7e:ac:c8:2c:2b:9a:96:ad:66:32.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts:58
RSA host key for 192.168.1.215 has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.
For most people this is simply an annoyance. However, if you have any automated processes that use the old ssh keys to log in, you will need to update your keys. The DSA has a lot of good info, and instructions on how to use ssh-vulnkey too identify weak keys so I highly recommend giving it a good read.
As always, if you have any questions please drop by the forums or IRC!
It’s been a little while since our last stable release, but it’s definitely worth the wait!
Deki Wiki 8.05 is immediately available for consumption! This release has 170 bugs fixes, and contains features that’ll better help manage your community like IP and user banning, polyglot support, and transaction page restores. Not only that, we’ve added access to over a hundred new DekiScript functions that let you create dynamic data inside your wiki! And as always, we’ve tuned performance and made a few UI tweaks based on the feedback of the community.
If you subscribe to the MindTouch e-newsletter you received most of this information via email last week. If you’re not a subscriber, sign up today by providing your email in the e-newsletter field at the bottom of the MindTouch.com home page.
In This Issue
MindTouch Deki Wiki “Jay Cooke” v.8.5 RC1
MindTouch RPM’s and Amazon AMI
Continued Record Growth
“MindTouch Puts the Enterprise in 2.0″
Desktop Connector
MindTouch Enterprise Subscriptions
MindTouch Deki Wiki “Jay Cooke” RC1
Deki Wiki Jay Cooke (v8.5) is the latest release from MindTouch. We’ll be making an official announcement about “Jay Cooke” next week that will include details about the exciting new features of this release. Suffice it to say you can access RC1 from SVN. Being that I don’t want to spill all the beans about this new and very innovative release of Deki Wiki I’m only sharing a couple minor items about this release now. The full scope of the release will be revealed next week.
As always, we at MindTouch place a great emphasis on user experience. As avid users of our own software, we’ve been perennially aggravated by the inability to attach files while editing a page. It’s perfectly reasonable to upload a screenshot when writing technical documentation. Well, you finally can! Not only that, but our new file uploader allows you to do multi-file selection uploads and shows a progress bar. This blows away the previous user experience for file uploads and sets a new bar for others. See for yourself:
The only other item I’ll share with you about the “Jay Cooke” release is about the new versioning scheme we’re employing. Being an alert, avid fan of Deki Wiki, you’ve probably noticed our versioning went from 1.9.0 (Itasca) to 8.5 (Jay Cooke). To quell any concerns: no, we didn’t secretly release 7 versions of our software that you’ve missed. We’ve decided to adopt the Ubuntu versioning scheme – the first two numbers correspond to the year and the month of each release. Since Jay Cooke officially releases on May 6th, we’ve labeled it the 8.5 version. We feel that this is a more logical way to version releases, rather than using arbitrary numbers, which can be ambiguous.
MindTouch RPMs and Amazon AMI
MindTouch has regularly received complaints from our community that installation from source code is prohibitively complex. We’ve listened to your concerns and I’m very pleased to report that this will no longer be the case. Thanks to the hard work of Bob and Mathieu there are now RPMs for all major Linux distributions complete with official installation guides, an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)–still in beta–that makes kicking off an instance of Deki Wiki on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) infrastructure a snap and an updated official VMware installation guide. If you’re considering deploying Deki Wiki with the AMI I strongly encourage you to employ the assistance of Right Scale. They deliver easily manageable solutions on AWS and are a strong MindTouch partner. We hope you enjoy these new installation tools; please let us know what you think.
Continued Record Growth
Thanks in no small part to our community of users, developers, and customers, MindTouch has continued to grow at a remarkable pace. Some key metrics from the last quarter:
Resellers in Germany, Spain, Sweden, Poland and Japan
Over 200,000 active installs - 100 percent increase
Installs on all major Linux distributions
More than 3,000 registered members at the developer community
Translated into 16 languages
With your help we’ll continue to develop cutting edge software and provide low-cost Enterprise support. Your assistance in spreading the word about MindTouch technologies with blog posts, installs, emails, and comments is invaluable to us.
“MindTouch Puts the Enterprise in 2.0″
Recently there was an article at InformationWeek about MindTouch. I provided commentary on the article at the MindTouch blog, but I’d like to expound on this for you now. In case you still think MindTouch Deki Wiki is just a wiki, allow me to clarify. Yes, it is a wiki, but it’s also an application integration platform and an application development platform. A very large percentage of MindTouch Deki Wiki users are using it to connect teams, enterprise systems, and Web 2.0 applications. They’re doing this with situational applications, dynamic report templates and by providing alternative interfaces to a variety of legacy systems that are inherently difficult to use. Mostly, this is not programmers doing this: these are IT professionals and power users that work in business groups. In these cases the wiki is more of a canvas to a distributed application platform or a kind of enterprise connective tissue. Many of our users are, in short, are using MindTouch to add the “2.0″ to their enterprise, and are doing so with IT governance.
Specifically, users are employing MindTouch to connect databases, ECM, CRM, Microsoft Access and Excel with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live, and other online services. I prefer to think of this as MindTouch delivering a Social Enterprise Platform that empowers the IT department to regain some control they’ve lost to the growing usage of Web 2.0 point applications and the business users to be given some control over how they access internal data and use enterprise applications. Bottom line: MindTouch users are realizing much more value from their existing systems and human resources because of MindTouch Deki Wiki and the IT department who is exposing legacy systems and other applications through MindTouch. Are you benefiting from MindTouch Deki Wiki in this way? If you want to learn more about MindTouch providing connective tissue to your enterprise IT infrastructure jump into the MindTouch Forums and see how other IT professionals and business users are using MindTouch Deki Wiki to connect systems. Or just contact us directly.
Desktop Connector
If you aren’t already using it, be certain to check out the MindTouch Desktop Connector. This free Microsoft Windows desktop tool allows users to drag and drop files, or entire directory structures directly into a Deki Wiki. The Desktop Connector recreates the entire directory structure on the fly and attaches files to the appropriate pages. This tool is prefect for creating and organizing wiki pages on the fly or for transferring lots of files to Deki Wiki. This works with Deki Wiki “Hayes” and later releases and is compatible with the MindTouch Online offering at www.wik.is. Download today it’s very useful and is robust in features. If you’re a programmer, check out the source code for the Desktop Connector from SVN. It operates on the Deki Wiki API and gives you a great example of how easy it is build on the Deki Wiki platform.
MindTouch Enterprise Subscriptions
Finally, I want to encourage any enterprise users to immediately contact us about MindTouch Enterprise subscriptions. If you’re team, organization, or enterprise is relying on Deki Wiki you will be well advised to evaluate them. These subscriptions immediately pay for themselves by saving your team time and money. Moreover, they provide the less tangible, but equally important piece of mind and security. Pricing of MindTouch Enterprise subscriptions was updated and a new plan added at the beginning of April. The newest plan is the MindTouch Enterprise Platinum plan that provides some very valuable Enterprise services, including our new MindTouch “Go Live” Certification, improved response time, and escalation. The “Go Live” Certification is the best way to insure your Deki Wiki install is optimally configured and secured. Contact us today about this.
MindTouch Deki Wiki "Itasca" is the first major release since "Hayes" last June. This is an exciting release because it includes many new features, significant performance improvements, usability enhancements, and a new tool that makes it a lot easier to create data mashups and composite applications. I’ll highlight some key new features in this newsletter, but I encourage you to review the full release notes.
Smart link dialog with auto-linking: select text, click link on Editor Toolbar, Deki Wiki will automatically search pages and file attachments to find the most relevant information.
Create composite applications and data mashups using a new dialog that gives users access to the more than 100 extensions to applications from Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and more! Without knowing how to program users can stitch together services from all over the web or from within their own Intranet to create situational applications and dynamic reports from multiple data sources and applications.
For more information about these new dialogs or to see them action watch Guerric's demo video he uploaded to the MindTouch account at Viddler.
SVN, Mantis, Trac, and Atlassian Jira integration coupled with syntax highlighting for 15 programming languages and the capability to show sample code next to executing code makes Deki Wiki the ultimate software development collaboration platform. With Deki Wiki software engineers, testers and project managers are able to connect several systems and organize their everyday work tools in a manner most efficient to them. Take a look at how we’re using this integration at our developer community, OpenGarden. Or review this sample page:
Support for Multiple Editors - FCKeditor and TinyMCE. We’re still working out some bugs, but we’re committed to supporting Opera and Safari browsers and both FCKeditor and TinyMCE support these browsers.
More than 100 bugs squashed and significantly improved performance
If you’re not familiar with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it’s a Xen-based virtual hosting solution. Some of its outstanding features include flexible "pay as you go” pricing and a high degree of scalability. Thanks to Deki Wiki’s existing integration with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for file attachments all your files will also be stored by Amazon. In layman terms, this gives you a flexible, easy to manage, and cost efficient way to deploy Deki Wiki on a dedicated server with Amazon as your deployment partner.
To set up Deki Wiki with EC2 you need to have an EC2 account; so, sign up for an account today by visiting Amazon’s Web Services home page. For more information about this innovative and flexible deployment option visit our documentation on this subject.
Dream Emerald (1.5.0) Released
Dream, the foundational technology of MindTouch Deki Wiki also has a new major release named “Emerald”. This is the follow-up version to “Denim” which shipped last September. Since then, we’ve done many improvements to this versatile library and REST micro-server. Dream greatly simplifies REST-oriented programming without introducing abstractions that obfuscate the versatility of HTTP. Dream includes classes such as Plug and XUri that make the WebRequest and Uri/UriBuilder classes obsolete. Dream promotes better programming practices and requires significantly less lines of code. Similarly, the XDoc class is a generalization of XmlDocument, XmlNode, and XmlNodeList that streamlines direct operations on XML documents, alleviating the need for generated wrapper classes. To learn more about MindTouch Dream and the architecture of MindTouch Deki Wiki visit our technology page. Or you can read the Dream "Emerald" release notes.
New Free Deki Wiki Hosting
It's official, you can now get free Deki Wiki hosting, powered by MindTouch, at http://wik.is. This new service is full featured and ad-free. Site registration at Wik.is takes seconds and instantly creates a new Deki Wiki site for authoring and sharing content. This service is ideal for enterprise teams, workgroups, and power users who need a highly usable and functional online tool for sharing information, creating dynamic reports, and building powerful mashups.
Wik.is is free with 100MB of storage, unlimited users, unlimited pages, unlimited access to the API, and, most importantly…did I mention…without advertising! A “Pro” upgrade is available for $99 a year with 10GB of storage and full site customization.
I hope you enjoy the new services and bits and as always, please help us spread the word by re-posting to your blogs, wearing your MindTouch Tshirts, sporting your MindTouch stickers, and just generally telling all your friends about MindTouch. If you don’t have stickers and tshirts contact DamienH [at] MindTouch [dot] com.
Deki Wiki 1.8.3c is now available for public consumption! This release is primarily a stabilization release: 40 bugs were fixed for this release, which includes many speed optimizations to help you squeeze out as much performance from your hardware.
An important note for our VM users: Updating to this version will require you to run two commands instead of one:
/usr/bin/updateWiki.sh -d /usr/bin/updateWiki.sh
Please be sure to run both of these queries to successfully receive updates.
Barring any issues, our next release will be Deki Wiki 1.9.0, which is scheduled for release in mid-February.
A minor release for Deki Wiki (1.8.3b) was posted today. The list of fixed bugs is available on our release page.
This release contains mostly bug fixes, but also contains one new feature: automatic version pinging. When a release is posted, you will see a message in your control panel notifying you as such. We’ve also embedded a RSS feed which will contain technical news from MindTouch - staying on top of Deki Wiki updates has never been easier!
We’d also like to thank Marc Christensen for his work on packaging a Deki Wiki RPM for OpenSuse; it was his work in identifying PHP compatibility issues with Deki Wiki (all fixed in 1.8.3b!) which helped make this RPM a reality.
Before running your VM updates, please make sure you don’t have any local modifications! Once you have done so, simply run /usr/bin/updateWiki.sh and you’ll have the latest bits!
As always, if you have questions, you can register for our forums.
If you don’t have stickers and tshirts contact DamienH [at] MindTouch [dot] com.