MDC upgrade status report
We’re working toward upgrading the Mozilla Developer Center from MindTouch 9.08.3 to MindTouch 9.12. We’re going through some testing and tweaking on our staging server at the moment, and hope to deploy very soon. At the moment we’re sorting out a glitch with the RSS feeds on the staging server not loading properly.
The 9.12 release of MindTouch offers a few key improvements we’ll be hoping serve us very well.
Performance
MindTouch has done some significant work on performance. They’ve added a caching module that reduces database hits substantially, which in their tests increases performance by an average of 400%. Hopefully this will be noticeable for our users, since obviously performance has been one of the largest complaints we’ve had.
Scaling
A number of bugs that made our multiple-host configuration unstable have been fixed. Most of these were backported to the 9.08.3 release we’re running currently, but there should be a slight increase in reliability with the impending upgrade.
Editor
MindTouch 9.12 supports CKEditor 3.0, the newest generation of the editor currently in use on MDC. This will not be activated at the outset, while we do further testing on the staging server, but this editor upgrade should offer us improved performance, accessibility, and reliability. In addition, it has a new JavaScript API that should let us extend it in new ways to even better suit our needs.