OK, putting aside the silly release naming convention — this is a pretty big announcement for the really cool open source wiki provider, MindTouch.

MindTouch has continued to gain tons of traction and I hear, from one of our common advisors, that they’re getting a lot of downloads on a daily basis. This is a great thing and today’s announcement is important for several reasons.

They’re announcing some cool new features like:

Polygot support - What’s that? The ability to host all languages on a single site. Now languages can be specified by pages and sections which automatically adapt the UI based on the language. You can also search across all languages and results pages are prioritized based our your default language (as a user).

More community management features - especially for managing larger wiki sites such as IP and user banning, talk pages and advanced page management.

Content transforms - this is the ability to allow content during editing which will automatically be transformed based on the content type of the snippet. For example, you could specify text for syntax highlighting, SVG, LaTex, various graphs, and more… Plus, adding new types of transforms is easy through their extensible API capability.

Open search - this release now supports the open search API

But by far, the most important part of this announcement is the Mozilla endorsement:

MindTouch’s Web Oriented Architecture, feature set, and user experience were reasons cited by Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s Chief Evangelist, for having selecting Deki Wiki after an extensive evaluation of vendors. “I’m looking forward to deploying Deki Wiki for the Mozilla Developer Center; especially with the enhancements that the Jay Cooke release brings,” said Shaver, “Mozilla believes in the power of the web to bring people together in wonderfully collaborative ways and MindTouch Deki Wiki’s extensibility and flexible architecture will allow us bring more of this to our developer community. The opportunity to easily create our own tools and extensions on top of Deki’s extensive API is sure to inspire some great improvements from our community.”

The v8.05 release was driven in part by the requirements of Mozilla, which selected MindTouch for the upcoming re-launch of their Mozilla Developer Community. I think this is a pretty significant endorsement and a huge win for MindTouch and Deki Wiki. Congratulations to Aaron and team for this big win and significant release.

I’m hoping to look to use Deki Wiki for the launch of Techpedia Atlanta this summer.