The office has been abuzz with a lot of activity as we put the finishing touches on the Lyons open source release. The team’s down to 20 bugs (but most of them are so trivial they may be pushed off to Lyons+). Pete recently updated wiki.developer.mindtouch.com with the Lyons bits, and I’m quite confident we’ll have the open source version ready by the next week.

Google Summer of Code

We’ll be applying to be a mentor in the Google Summer of Code project. All the developers here are quite passionate about what they do, and I know they’d all make some kick-ass mentors. For those of you who would like to see some open source projects developed around Deki, please contribute to our “Ideas” page for our GSoC submission! A pre-thanks to Craig for driving this process forward for us!

MindTouch Developer Center Relaunch

As we wrap up this release (and all the packaging/marketing work that goes with it), we’ve started to focus our engineering efforts back towards relaunching our MindTouch Developer Center. I speak to various developers outside of MindTouch on a weekly basis about all the custom work they’ve done for Deki, and the one thing I keep hearing is, “How can I contribute back?”

It’s clear from our developer center that barring a few sections (DekiScript and the Deki API documentation are fantastic), we’ve done a very poor job of organizing our content. As is the case with most organically grown documentation, our attempts to over-organize with hierarchies before the content existed painted us in a bit of a corner (now it’s nearly impossible to figure out what goes where!). My two favorite sections to navigate are the DekiScript section and the general FAQ, and we’ll be taking our lessons from those two sections and applying that same ease of navigation throughout all the sections.

There is also not a way to contribute code back to the community: how many DekiScript samples and Deki skins are buried in the forums? While a full-fledged forge will be a bit much to swallow for the initial launch, one of our goals will be work towards a forge where community members can share their work with Deki.

Currently, our developer center is a bunch of pieces of software cobbled together:

• Deki - primary documentation tool
• Mantis - bug tracking
• vBulletin - forums
• WordPress - our developer blog
• Translate – custom-rolled application for updating localization keys
• Deki Social – a custom application for managing social profiles – it’s current purpose is to do account synchronization between all our applications (with the exception of WordPress)

With all the changes inside Lyons (notifications, page properties), there is no reason Deki wouldn’t take the role of Deki Social. Deki should be aggregating all the user information across these various sites, mashing them up, and providing a useful dashboard for activity for any user across all these sites. With our PHP hooks and modules, Deki can also serve as the central repository for keeping all user accounts in sync (passwords, usernames, login cookies).

Sound exciting? I’m pretty pumped – this has been the vision we’ve been incrementally working towards for six months, and now we’re on the cusp of actually achieving this level of close integration between all these developer tools.

Guerric has already started on working on the front-end plug-ins to handle single sign-on and account synchronization as well as some of the use cases I mentioned above.

But for now, what I need to ask from you is to start looking over our ideas for the MDC Relaunch and to start throwing your ideas on there. We’re especially interested in your ideas about how to reorganize the content on the MDC site to better suit your needs, so please … drop on by and let us know your thoughts!