Open source wiki vendor MindTouch is releasing a series of major new features Monday and some of them are quite interesting. People used to talk about MindTouch for its outlandish stunts – like working with nutball John Gotts on the short-lived Wiki.com platform and hiring a Bono impersonator to walk the exhibit floor at DEMO. Those days seem like the distant past as now the MindTouch software gets attention on its own.
Today the company’s product, called Dekiwiki, gets an application platform based on its own simple language called dekiscript and a new execution engine. Additionally, a newly organized infrastructure will now allow thousands of wikis to be run with a single multi-tenant install. This should make management of multiple wikis in one organization far easier than ever before.
Also new is easy integration outside data scraped by Dapper.net and displays data using the new Google Charts API wrapped in Dekiscript for easier mashup creation. I really like Dapper a lot – see our most recent coverage of this paradigm changing tool here. This is really what motivates me to write about this release. Nn open source wiki integrating the screen scraping power of Dapper and displaying the data using the Google Charts API is just plain cool.
The company claims it sees 30k free downloads each month and most public discussion of the product is very positive. This past month, the company added open source industry journalist Matt Asay to its board of advisors and released versions of Dekiwiki translated into 9 different languages.
Below is a video from the company showing off all the new features in today’s release. There’s a lot going on for MindTouch – the company’s outlook seems to be getting brighter all the time.
