The Lombardi Wikis use a few core plugins to the Confluence wiki that provide the general look and feel, and many features that go beyond the out-of-box wiki experience. One such plugin, the Theme Builder by Adaptavist, has been with us since Day One, and is a critical system component. But, it’s a commercial plugin, and therefore extending it and fixing the occasional bug has not really been an option.

Also, the open-source DITA2Wiki Project, which the Lombardi Wikis implement, uses  Theme Builder to provide optional but very popular features. Theme Builder has been the only commercial component in this open-source project, and for users with very limited budgets, this can be a blocker.

Adaptavist recently announced that the Theme Builder plugin will be open source. This is good news for the DITA2Wiki community for a couple of reasons:

• We can now fix any bugs we discover and extend it without necessarily engaging a third party. And, we can give those improvements back to the open-source community. The community can continue to fund Adaptavist’s innovations by buying their support services.
• The Lombardi Wikis implements the open-source DITA2Wiki project, with heavy use of the Theme Builder. A free Theme Builder will likely grow the adoption of the DITA2Wiki framework, and hopefully increase community contributions to the plugin this way.