Lyons (9.02)

Introduction

Since the release of Kilen Woods, we've been listening to the needs of both our open source community as well as our commercial customers to define the direction of the Lyons release - well, we're proud to show you what we've been working on. The primary theme behind the Lyons release is the continued extension of the MindTouch platform for developers to build applications that connect and remix data. 

MindTouch has always excelled at mash-ups - Deki Extensions and DekiScript both have vast capabilities to pull, manipulate, and visualize different data sources; this release contains updates to the DekiScript language which brings more mashup capabilities to developers. With Lyons, you can utilize JEM to build rich internet applications (RIA) by taking advantage of the closer integration between DekiScript, Javascript, jQuery, and PageBus.

But what about pushing that data back out? With Lyons, we've turned MindTouchinto a switchboard by adding push notifications. Custom applications can hook into MindTouch and be sent notifications when content changes are made - this makes it possible to send data back out from MindTouch. Using the new notifications feature, we've added perhaps the most-requested feature we've heard over the last year: email notifications. Changes made to pages or whole trees will be sent out as email notifications to anybody who is subscribed to a page. 

Developers writing complex applications on top of MIndTouch now have access to a local data store with properties. These properties are key/value pairs that are used to describe files, pages, or users.

In addition, we've added a front-end plugin API which simplifies the process for adding custom UI behaviors to MindTouch. These plug-ins allow developers to adapt MindTouch to workflows specific to their organizations.

Along with all the goodies for developers, we've also made it much easier to manage your MindTouch communities. Armed with the results of our usability testing from the revamped control panel, we've made more changes for administrators which make it much easier to discover all of MindTouch's configurable features.  Administrators will also notice that there are more tools at their disposal for tweaking and configuring all of MindTouch's functionality.

On top of all the developer and administrative additions, we've also spent time making the editor's job easier. Users will find that editorial control is much easier to exert in the Lyons release. For example, you can now completely control the permissions of every user and group on every page (or page tree) with ease. It's also much easier to track changes made inside MIndTouch with our new RSS feed formats, updates to the Recent Changes UI, and our new revision comparison diff engine. With these updates, it will take users less time to view the specific changes and to undertake actions based on these changes, like banning an abusive member.

For the daily contributors of MindTouch, we've improved the content creation tools. We've created a new tagging method which aids users in finding existing tags and help hone a single vocabulary of tags. Users will also notice that inserting images and attachments on the fly has been streamlined to make producing content even easier. In addition, we've added support for editing Word documents with save capabilities, for Internet Explorer, inside MindTouch.

MindTouch 9.02.2

MindTouch 9.02.2 is an incremental bugfix release of MindTouch, which addresses 65 issues raised by our community since the launch of Lyons (see changelog below). To MindTouch Standard 2009 and MindTouch Enterprise 2009, SQL Server database connector capabilities are added to Linux (only previously available on our beta MSI).

MindTouch 9.02.3

MindTouch 9.02.3 is the official build from which MindTouch 2009 for Windows was built. Given the Windows-specific issues that were resolved for this release, this release is not available for Linux distributions. The release of 9.02.4 (late July) will be the first release where both Linux and Windows packages are realigned.

Lyons Preview Video

Status

• MindTouch 2009 / 9.02.3 (Windows only); MT SVN r. 14868 ( June 26th, 2009)
• MindTouch 2009 / 9.02.2; MT SVN r.14533 (June 11th, 2009)
• MindTouch 2009 / 9.02.1 available; MT SVN r.13872 (April 13th, 2009)
• Open source final available; MT SVN r. r13643 (March 27th, 2009)
• Preview 3 available; MT SVN r. 13430 (March 3rd, 2009)
• Preview 2 available; MT SVN r. 13201 (February 19th, 2009)
• Preview 1 available (February 3rd, 2009)
• Final release roadmap finalized - wrapping up development in trunk (December 23rd, 2008)
• Roadmap finalized; in development. (October 3rd, 2008)
• Initial featureset drawn up (September 10th, 2008)

Get the release

If you are updating, please be sure you back-up your data before upgrade. This release features significant database and filesystem schema changes.

• Source: MindTouch Deki 9.02.2
  • Note: On a source upgrade, the rewrite rules change is not done automatically.
• Windows: MindTouch 2009 for Windows
• RPMs: http://repo.mindtouch.com/
  • Note: On a package upgrade, the rewrite rules change is not done automatically.
    For RPMs, the new apache conf is installed under /etc/httpd/conf.d/deki-apache.conf.disabled
    For DEBs, apt prompts the user to replace the /etc/apache2/sites-available/dekiwiki
• VM:
  • Existing VM users can user /usr/bin/updateWiki.sh to update
    
  • New VM users can download the VM image from SourceForge
• Official Installation/Upgrade Guides (Community driven guides also available on MindTouch Developer Center)

Changelog

Roadmap

Our initial roadmap were culled from an initial list of potential features by factoring in internal engineering discussions, feedback from customers, as well as help from the open source community: 

• Deki Event Bus - Deki will start pushing notifications to applications - this allows for expansive capabilities, such as email notifications, Twitter,and  IM notifications on certain types of changes. (Configure Page Alerts)
• Granular Permissions- While the Deki API has support for very granular permissions, the UI has, in previous releases, sacrificed some of the flexibility for the sake of simplicity. This release features a revamped restriction dialog which will allow for more granular permissions - groups and users can be attached to a page with different roles instead of being granted the same ones.
• Page/User Metadata - Metadata (simple key/value pairs) can be attached to users and pages; this allows developers an option to store persistent data associated with pages and users; this data will be available in DekiScript to allow for more feature-rich DekiScript applications.
• PHP Hooks/Modules- The PHP layer of Deki has been undergoing a refactoring to provide a more modular design - this will allow developers to write plug-ins very similarly to WordPress - this serves the added benefit of making it easier to deploy Deki for custom projects like Mozilla, which require some custom functionality in the PHP layer.
• DekiScript improvements- DekiScript expanded the scope of its scripting capabilities to enable you to build more fully-fledged applications inside Deki
• Page Prerendering - The API will start storing a pre-rendered version of each page - this opens the door to future features that may involve drafts, previews, or content moderation
• Diff views - Improve the UI for diff views; it's currently difficult to understand the scope of each change
• Tagging improvements - Changes in the tagging feature improve the user experience for managing tags; the improved user experience will allow for a more consistent tagging taxonomy
• CheckDb- A stand-alone application that will verify the data integrity of your Deki database to help debug any errors inside Deki
• Control panel UI improvements - building upon the momentum of the release of the new control panel in Kilen Woods, we've gone through and done usability testing and made more tweaks to continue to provide the best administrative experience possible
• Deuce - a new skin is available in beta status