Author Archive
MindTouch Noatak (9.12) released
Noatak (version 9.12) is the last major release of the MindTouch 2009 family. This release is the first step in a phased approach to adding eventual support for other databases - while doing this refactoring, we were able to also chainsaw inefficient performance bottlenecks in MindTouch with the addition of a caching module that improved performance by 10x in our testing.
This release also added support for advanced charting through MindTouch Charts, powered by AnyChart. This commercial add-on allows you to create a wide variety of charting and gauges in MindTouch.
And is the case with all our releases, we have continued to polish the user experience to continue our strong tradition of providing a product that is incredibly easy to use.
Download this release, find out more about new features, or check out the bugfix list now!
MindTouch Community Portal cleanup!
We were a little scared to move close to 2000 pages and 10,000 revisions at once…
As you look for documentation on MindTouch at MCP, you may notice some changes! This past weekend, the MindTouch enginerds joined up in our swanky new offices to focus on one task: reorganizing the content of MCP.
Since we initially launched MCP (as its known in its current state in 2009), there’s been a lot of organic growth - in fact, we have over 22,000 pages in MCP! (Roughly half of it is distributed between the user and main namespaces) And as is the case with many community sites, there was some heavy gardening required.
This was a pretty complex project, and we’re fortunate to have Guerric and Corey drive us through this process.
First, they tried to get a handle on the existing site by identifying the common content types; each document roughly fell into one of these buckets:
- Reference
- Tutorials
- Manual
- Solutions
Based on this knowledge, they then proposed a high-level hierarchy of MCP which would vastly simplify the structure of the site. What’s important to note about the hierarchy is the KB section is not itself a hierarchy of topics (as we used to in the past). Instead, any information around MindTouch is now in one large bucket, and we use tags and DekiScript to categorize the content more effectively. I think you’ll find search to be a lot more effective now that we constrain to a bucket we know has quality content.
This is only the first of many documentation (and product!) related initiatives we have in 2010… stay tuned for more!
Important Security Notice (9.08.3 Release)
MindTouch recently identified a security issue that, under certain server configurations, could cause administrative credentials to be disclosed. Our engineering team has confirmed the issue and released a hotfix to remediate this issue for all versions supported by MindTouch. We have also issued an incremental release (9.08.3) which contains this security patch. If you are running an older version of MindTouch, we have also provided patch files if you feel a major upgrade is too risky. Detailed instructions on how to patch your systems can be found here.
It is imperative that you update your MindTouch installs immediately. We urge you to take a proactive approach in applying this patch, which should take no longer than ten minutes.
MindTouch places a great emphasis on the security of the platform, and will continue to improve on our release processes to diminish the likelihood of these types of issues.
MindTouch 9.08.2 Released
We’re starting off 2010 with the final stabilization release for Minneopa prior to the shipping of Noatak. While the changelog only shows five fixes, these are all critical fixes that should be applied to your installs to help the performance of your deployment.
You can pick up updates of this release on the VM by running updateWiki.sh - for all other environments can download the update from our website.
MindTouch 9.08.1: Hardening Release
Minneopa State Park
Photo by Jon Mierow
While the MindTouch team has been busy working on new features for the Noatak release, we’ve also felt it necessary to backport some bugs (of the security and performance nature) which have been hindering our customers.
Both MindTouch Core as well as our commercial customers can pick up version 9.08.1, which is a hardening release with 47 bugs fixed. This release should be considered a must-upgrade, as there were a couple edge case security bugs that have been resolved.
You can check out the whole bugfix history on our release notes page, but here are a few highlighted pain points that I know many of our users have been running into:
- Bugfix 6928: Link dialog search stops after a period
- Bugfix 7176: Custom extensions do not reliably start on host restart
- Bugfix 6390: Edit and ACL and check ‘Apply to children’ trashes children’s ACLs
- Bugfix 7172: xPath Namespace prefix “_” is invalid or undefined
- A couple XSS holes on special pages have been fixed
- Leaking of the API key through certain API exceptions has been fixed