New Wiki System: Deki Wiki

Christopher Rawlings rawlinc at gmail.com
Tue Jul 22 07:50:55 CEST 2008


I'm not sure what the wiki reorg will entail, but is a move to a
different wiki system a consideration?  If it is, then Deki Wiki (made
by Mindtouch) would most certainly benefit the Openmoko documentation
efforts.  I can't begin to explain how much better it is than any
other wiki out there.  I have evaluated quite a few wiki systems and
Deki Wiki is the only one in its class (enterprise quality and
free)...very easy to manage, excellent feature set, permissioning,
multilingual support, etc.  I have personally setup this wiki for
managing documentation at the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft.
Also, Mozilla's developer community is migrating to Deki Wiki and they
have greatly influenced the features that are included in Deki Wiki.

Deki Wiki Feature Overview (also see
http://wiki.mindtouch.com/MindTouch_Deki/Features):

- All pages are hierarchical - This is a huge benefit for sites
focused on documentation rather than random subjects (i.e. Wikipedia).
 A site index is automatically created for the hierarchy, table of
contents is automatically generated for each page, transclusion can be
used to include contents of one page (either entire page or section of
a page) into another page.

-Tagging - their tagging features would make it really easy to group
pages (i.e. tags like 'needs updating', 'outdated', etc and of course
regular subject related tags)

-Extensive Permissioning System - Restricted pages are hidden from
search results, the sitemap, etc for users who do not have access
privileges to a particular page (or group of pages).

-Lucerne Search - Deki Wiki includes the open source enterprise search
solution from the Apache Software Foundation.  Not only are wiki pages
indexed, but file attachments for many common file types are indexed
as well.  There is no other enterprise open source search like
Lucene...it is THE enterprise open source solution.

-REST-based architecture - Deki Wiki's business logic and API runs on
Mono and is completely separated from its PHP presentation layer.
This means that Deki Wiki extensions that interface with the API can
be written in any language (i.e. that is, any language that has
support for the HTTP protocol).

-RSS Feeds - RSS feeds are supplied for sitewide changes, individual
user contributions, watch lists, etc

-Templates - Templates can be created and used for common/repetitive
task.  Templates can also be paramterized.

-Wiki Page Attachments (files, documents, images, etc), documents are
revisioned automatically

-Wiki Page Comment System and talk pages

-WYSIWYG Editor - deki wiki currently has support for 3 WYSIWYG editors

I could list many more features and I hope I have missed anything
major, but nothing speaks better than the fact that they use their own
products.  To see a production site with Deki Wiki in action, check
out Mindtouch's own development wiki here:

http://wiki.developer.mindtouch.com/

I don't want to sound too much like an ad with this information, but I
would seriously recommend at least taking a look at this wiki
solution.  I am willing to donate my time to help manage and setup the
wiki.  I'd love to see the Openmoko project succeed and the
documentation is key to developer uptake.

-Chris




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