Has core gone end of life?

[bwhiting]

Is there anymore development going on for core? Is the development (from Mindtouch) finished and now dependent entirely on the community?

[dillweed]

I'm interested in this also. Is there any activity going on? We are considering moving our wiki to mindtouch, but are holding off until we can be certain there be support for the core product.

[SteveB]

MindTouch Core is getting quarterly updates. Last quarter, we released 10.1.3 and in a few weeks, we're releasing 10.1.4. These releases continue to improve upon 10.1 across a variety of issues. However, new feature development is focused on MindTouch TCS.

[daibach]

Will the quarterly updates for MindTouch Core include supporting newer versions of PHP? Just been testing the wiki against PHP 5.4 without even getting to the installation page.

[dillweed]

Steve,

Thank you for your reply. Not sure of a good way to put this, but if the Core is not getting new features does not that mean that Core has reached the end of life? New features would be great, but I can understand the necessity to make money also. Should I start looking for alternatives?

[SteveB]

PHP 5.4 comes with some breaking changes to existing functions, which make it quite an undertaking to support. I'm not expecting support to happen soon.

[SteveB]

dillweed,

I hear you. The 10.1 releases are targeted at existing customers who expect us to provide continued support and address security issues when they get discovered. We are committed to ensuring they continue to get the most of their investment. We then make these same changes available in MindTouch Core for everyone else. MindTouch TCS has quickly evolved into an amazing product with features taking full advantage AWS' capabilities. What you get from a native cloud stack is virtually unmatchable. It would cost customers an arm and a leg to have comparable performance, reliability, and features on premise. Whatever solution you may gravitate towards, I highly recommend you favor cloud-based regardless of vendor.

[cnoffsin]

Yes but in doing the cloud version you are leaving out a key demographic of customers that need the solution inside their firewall. We had a sales call, realized you guys were going all cloud, and ruled you out and will just continue to use the core version for now until we find something else. We are a pharmaceutical compliance company that frankly needs our information inside our network.

The main bug I see in core currently is that it does not index .xlsx and .docx files for keyword search. This is a large issue. And I can't help but ask is there a bug report on it and will it be fixed in a future maintenance release of core?

[SteveB]

I understand that for some companies, it can be a problem, but that's a shrinking market. Most companies seem to be happy to rely on SSL and IP-restrictions to ensure their intranet remains closed while hosted in the cloud.

Now onto the more relevant issue for you. I recall the .xlsx issue having been addressed in TCS. You can either wait for a backport or you can address the issue locally yourself. Indexing is governed by simple filter applications that convert a binary into plain text. Filters are defined in the site's startup.xml. I'm assuming you're not running on Windows, since the Windows install uses Microsoft IFilter infrastructure to index pretty much anything the Index Server understands. On Linux, you can find various utilities that either do what you need right of the box or write a simple script around them so that the site can send the document to index into stdin and the filter output the text over stdout. Part of the Linux installation are several such filters and script which should provide a good starting point for addressing your issue today.

[dillweed]

Hey again,

I think what is most concerning to me is that the whole product would get dropped to focus solely on the commercial product. I am hoping that something like that doesn't happen with Core. We are a small company without the budget to purchase a license for TCS, but the open source wikis out there are too hard to use for the employees at the company.

Mindtouch really, as far as I can tell, has the best wysiwyg interface for non-technical users. The wikis out there say they are easy to use, but that is so far from the truth. From my opinion a successful wiki would cater to those that aren't tech-savvy, but have the option for more advanced editing.

In the end, the company can't afford TCS, but really needs something easy to use like Mindtouch Core. I really want to get away from Mediawiki, but the fact that Core might not be supported further is really holding me back from the switch.