It was a long time in the making, but we’ve finally released the open source version of MindTouch Deki Lyons!

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 Deki platform for developers to build applications that connect and remix data.

MindTouch Deki 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 MindTouch Deki into a switchboard by adding push notifications. Custom applications can hook into Deki and be sent notifications when content changes are made – this makes it possible to send data back out from Deki. 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 Deki 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 Deki. These plug-ins allow developers to adapt Deki to workflows specific to their organizations.

Along with all the goodies for developers, we’ve also made it much easier to manage your Deki 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 Deki’s configurable features.  Administrators will also notice that there are more tools at their disposal for tweaking and configuring all of Deki’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 Deki 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 Deki, 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 Deki.

Download MindTouch Deki Lyons (9.02) open source or read the release notes for more information. We are working on the commercial version of Lyons now – this release should be ready mid-April.

Please drop by our forums if you’ve questions or concerns.