I hope the summertime finds all of you well! The MindTouch team has been abuzz with activity lately, and we have the official open-source release of Kilen Woods (MindTouch Deki 8.08) to show for it!

In Kilen Woods, we made a lot of dramatic user interface changes for both administrators and editors: a new control panel, a new editor, and integration with PrinceXML for PDF generation. The new editor adds support for Google Chrome, which is blazingly fast when using Deki (try it out at our developer center). From a stabilization standpoint, 90 bugs were resolved since MindTouch 8.05.2b, including the infamous search index bug.

New control panel!

Quite frankly, the old control panel was unnecessarily complex. We scrapped the old control panel completely, and went back to the drawing board to design, from the ground-up, a much cleaner user experience. You should find the new control panel not only more logically organized, but more aesthetically pleasing. You’ll find we paid attention to the details: simple things like pre-defined templates for LDAP authentication providers as well as easier DekiScript and Extensions set-up.

New editor: FCKeditor

It became clear to us that we would eventually have to switch editors inside Deki for a multitude of reasons. Over the past half-year, we’ve incrementally integrated FCKeditor, and now we’re finally ready to flip the switch for everybody! While there are a ton of reasons why FCKeditor will be technically better, the most important one is that FCKeditor improves the editing experience for users. Let me just say this: double scrollbar. If you understand why this is a problem … you’ll want to know what we changed!

Awesome PDF printing

When I first saw what PrinceXML had to offer, I couldn’t believe it. Controlling the layout of PDF documents with CSS? Custom typographic control in generated PDFs? This was a print designer’s dream come true! We’ve now bundled Deki to take advantage of Prince XML for printing and deprecated official support for HTML2PS/PS2PDF (which never worked as well as we’d liked, anyways).

Thanks to the wonderful team at YesLogic (the authors of PrinceXML), Deki users get free usage of Prince in return for the watermark on electronically generated PDFs; show your support by purchasing a license from their website (discounted pricing is available for Deki users).

See an example of a PDF generated from Deki with Prince.

Kilen Woods is immediately available for source release, VM download, and VM updates. RPM packages will be available next week. Our hosted site, Wik.is, will not be immediately upgraded, but it will receive the 8.08 bits sometime in the future.

For commercial customers, MindTouch Deki 8.08 (Enterprise Edition) will be available shortly. We are in the process of bundling application connectors and certifying the Enterprise build.

Download MindTouch Deki 8.08 (Kilen Woods) or read the release notes. As always, if you have any questions, drop by our forums.

Mea culpa

Some of you noticed that the announcement for the release of Kilen Woods went out early in last month’s MindTouch newsletter (mea culpa!) … while I didn’t anticipate delays taking us into the month of September, I decided to be extra careful because of the many architectural changes in this release. While previous releases have generally had only one release candidate, I thought it’d be wise to issue two release candidates for the sake of additional stability. While the long wait might have been unpleasant to some, it was Kilen us. (Not as bad as that pun, I bet)

categories: Deki, MindTouch, Updates