The Internet was originally conceived to improve communication between far-flung researchers. Today, of course, the Internet can be used by anyone, virtually anywhere, to send and receive information of all kinds. Email, newsgroups, web sites, and more recently, blogs, and RSS feeds are all methods to share information.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tikiwiki
The Internet was originally conceived to improve communication between far-flung researchers. Today, of course, the Internet can be used by anyone, virtually anywhere, to send and receive information of all kinds. Email, newsgroups, web sites, and more recently, blogs, and RSS feeds are all methods to share information.
While all of those forms of communication are popular and effective, they’re also implicitly static: an article in a newsgroup can’t be changed once it’s posted, and the content of a web page is typically maintained and controlled by the page’s owner. Certainly, people can post replies to groups and submit comments to a web site’s forums, but even that new material remains as standalone, static amendments to the original content.
Wikis, on the other hand, are implicitly collaborative. Content — any content — in the wiki can be changed, extended, or created anew at any time by any user (although some access controls are typically available). In fact, a wiki is largely a content management system, where the wiki itself is just one way to organize and present the information.
And that’s the kernel of the idea behind TikiWiki, or just Tiki, an expansive wiki that also provides for articles, file and image galleries, forums, weblogs, and many other forms of sharing information. At more than 250,000 lines of code, and more than 375 different features, the Tiki developers describe their work as “A catch-all PHP application, so you don’t have to install so many!”
This month, iki project leaders Luis Argerich and Garland Foster invite us in to their hut to discuss their ambitious project.
What is Tiki?
Luis Argerich: Tiki is a general-purpose content management system that can be used for intranets, online communities, portals, forums, and many other kinds of applications. It’s not unique, but it has many, many features, a very active development rhythm, and very detailed documentation.
Garland Foster: Tiki is a full-featured content management (CMS) system. It has a lot of tiny and not so tiny details, making it unique. We have a workflow engine, graphic creation using jGraphPad, an XML-RPC interface to edit blogs using desktop tools, PDF generation, wiki structures, quizzes, configurable trackers, a caching system to cache external links in any object, categories, themes that can be changed for individual sections, etc., etc. And the “et ceteras” are not trivial at all! We like to say, “You can do * using Tiki.”
Why “yet another” content management system?
Argerich: While there were a lot of open source content management systems at the time Tiki was started, no one package fulfilled the list of features we wanted. There were also a lot of problems with licensing and the way the projects were handled. For example, some started as free products and then switched to paid releases. We wanted a 100%-free CMS, a huge list of features, and no license restrictions. Tiki was born.
Foster: When we started there were some very nice pieces of software in PHP, some good content management systems, nice forums, blogs, and even nice wikis. But what if we wanted everything in a single package so users, permissions, and administration can be shared? That’s how Tiki was started, and now we can’t stop the gigantic snowball.
Tiki sounds a little daunting. Does it feel “monolithic?”
Argerich: Tiki does have a zillion features, yet it’s simple and friendly. It’s easy to install, easy to use, and has very complete documentation. You can turn off all the features but one and have a nice wiki, a blog, or forum software. If you need to add a feature to your site you don’t need to download another PHP product — just enable the feature and roll. Another key aspect is the use of Smarty and templates so you can easily customize Tiki to look like anything you want without touching a single line of PHP code.
Your project is very ambitious. What’s been your biggest challenge?
Foster: Keeping the balance between the number of features and the quality of features. We decided to start adding as many features as we could as fast as possible, so more and more users could help us refine the features. In general, in the near future, we’d like to focus on making features better and better more often than adding new features. But so far, it’s been “Expand first. Conquer later.” Maintaining the documentation and the translations to different languages has also been a big challenge.
Linux Magazine /
July 2003 / PROJECT OF THE MONTH
TikiWiki
