That's right - RikWik: Goomburra is finally available.

Goomburra is a Wiki engine written entirely in ASP.NET. It has a number of features that set it apart from existing Wiki solutions, particularly in how extensible it is. It's also open source under a BSD license so go grab it and give it a go.

I've opened up this page so you can give Goomburra a go online. You have full permissions to edit the page, change the skin and generally try things out.

All the details are on the RikWik page including the (abbreviated) feature list.

In case you haven't noticed, comments on this blog have been disabled since shortly after the upgrade. They're now running again, and now you can comment in wiki format!

This means you can try out things like **bold** for bold, //italic// for italic plus lots of other things.

The release of RikWik:Goomburra is edging ever closer, plus when I do I'll be opening a sandbox so you can try some stuff out without downloading and installing yourself.

I decided to check how my Goomburra skin rendered in some other browsers and the result was... pathetic. So I've delayed my deployment to try to fix this up. Really my only problem is with the menu. Currently I'm using the solpart menu - basically because that's what DotNetNuke uses, but after looking further into it I've discovered that it seems to be a constant source of problems for DNN skinners.

If anybody has a suggestion for an another free ASP.NET menu system then let me know with a comment (if it works for you... the current commenting UI doesn't always work - something that will be fixed with Goomburra!)

I'm almost ready to deploy an initial version of RikWik:Goomburra but I'm being thwarted by a limit on the size of file I can upload to my host to restore a database from... I'll try some other methods.

This means that hopefully within the next couple of days I'll have a version available for release. Note that this will only be an alpha version, but my initial testing is fairly positive and I really want to get something out there for people to play with - though there's probably nobody who actually wants to play with it.

I'll also try to post some of the features over the next few days.

I've just started hacking skin support into RikWik:Goomburra. I'm aiming at making the skin support compatible with DotNetNuke so you can take advantage of all the existing skins available there. Initial investigation looks promising, though some elements don't translate well from a portal to a Wiki.

The RikWik blogging engine now supports comments. Comments can be entered from the website or via the commentAPI which I presume most aggregators support (I've been testing from RSS Bandit). Some also some support for letting comments be entered in wiki format; however, that isn't activated for anonymous users because of potential cross-site scripting issues.

The support for this actually pushed the general RikWik architecture along a bit. RikWik now supports separate .NET objects for different page types and also makes it easier for these objects to supply their own method of rendering pages to different content types (eg. RSS). Originally this type of thing wasn't planned until the next major rewrite of RikWik.

I also had to add some extensions to the RSS.NET to allow it to write out commentAPI and Dublin Core elements. I guess I should clean these up and send them back to the RSS.NET project... I found the RSS.NET modules interface reasonably simple to use. I probably would've done it a bit different but it was pretty simple to add to. I'm not sure whether it's finalised yet or not.