You may not have noticed, but there are several wiki’s with PowerShell content in them, but generally speaking, they are the results of the effort of a single person (or very a small group) ... and none of them seems to have captured the attention of the general PowerShell community. Certainly, the PowerShell Community site has never had it’s own wiki.
I’ve been pushing for an unofficial community wiki for awhile, and recently, I had an opportunity to try out MindTouch DekiWiki at work, and I was so impressed, I decided to throw one up and take it upon myself to demo to Halr9000 and a few of the MVPs (and now … to all of you!) why I think we should set up a DekiWiki for our community
It’s really quite simple. On top of having some really awesome features like hierarchical pages, a WYSIWYG editor, and built-in lucene search and file attachments … it also has a REST api, and you can edit the pages in plain-old HTML (not really surprising considering the WYSIWYG interface). The combination of these two things, and the MindTouch Dream sdk (along with good examples of using it with the Deki REST API) make it so easy to work with in .Net and PowerShell, that I just felt compelled to share my scripts…
First is the conversion script, which is based on New-HtmlHelp, some excellent work by one of the VMWare PowerShell guys …
But then, the more interesting stuff, written on top of MindTouch Dream (you need to download Dream from SourceForge.net to use it, or just grab both my scripts and the dlls in a 7-zip archive), a series of cmdlets which abstract away some of the intricacies of the DekiWiki API. So far, I’ve only written a few … most notably: Set-DekiContent, which will allow you to write a little loop like this:
foreach($cmd in (gcm -type cmdlet | ? { $_.PsSnapin -like "Microsoft.PowerShell*" })) {
Get-Help $cmd.Name -full -EA "SilentlyContinue" | ConvertTo-DekiContent Cmdlet_Help |
%{ Set-DekiContent "Cmdlet_Help/$($cmd.PSSnapin)/$($cmd.Name)" $_ }
}
Which produces this PowerShell Cmdlet Help … pretty cool, right? Incidentally, feel free to contribute more, and/or comment on or edit the help for those cmdlets to improve upon it.
Without futher ado, here’s the script module:
[...] the wonderful Deki Wiki software, and I’m quickly falling in love with it. And thanks to some PoSh goodness by Jaykul, you can see the get-help for all of the Command Shell cmdlets. Right now I’m using [...]
[...] APIs, which use not just GET and POST, but PUT and DELETE as well. Then, while I was playing with scripting the REST API for DekiWiki … I experimented with the MindTouch Dream SDK … and now I’ve refactored the part [...]