Tiki Wiki
Tiki WikiTo get up to date information, please visit: http://tiki.org/, while http://tiki.org/Model will introduce you to the Tiki model.
For help getting started with Tiki, try: Tiki for Smarties: A beginner's guide to Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware http://tikiforsmarties.com
The remaining information below is very old, and should be refactored. There are some critical reviews and some praise, but most of the stuff is severely out of date (4+ years old) and now irrelevant. Especially the one predicting (at version 1.9) that Tiki would "slowly die". Tiki is now at version 9.x and is stronger than ever!
SecurityManagement alert in early 2005
arbitrary code execution in spoofed images see http://secunia.com/advisories/13768/
Tiki is fast becoming a true contender in the CMS (ContentManagementSystem) arena. Combining the powers of wiki and the modularization of P*Nuke Tiki deserves a slot in your CMS testing. There is also a fork of TikiWiki called BitWeaver (formerly known as TikiPro) that solved Tiki performance issues and added much modularity.
Can anyone be more specific about why this goes in the direction of CMS and explain what's the thing about PHP-Nuke?
More to the point, does anyone want to look at the stability, usability, and maintainability of this as a system? My experiences with it have thus been extremely negative in all three areas, despite working through numerous releases of the product. Unfortunately, the approach appears to be more of an add-all-the-features-we-can-find-anywhere, while not being very focused on overall quality, good design, or XP processes.
I think, they go the CMS way, because they need an easy scalable and clean CMS. The competitors like p*nuke are almost based on homegrown code, which is very spaghetti like. Tiki on the other hand uses PearDB and Smarty Template Engine. This makes it very flexible. (Peter Grossmann, c2.com@acado.de)
I would tend to agree with both the reviewer above AND Peter's response. The stability, usability, and maintainability are very questionable. But because of the loose coupling of the application logic and the web front end (delivered via Smarty) that usability can be overcome almost entirely by modifying the templates to create a better interface. I initially experienced the same feelings that the reviewer (in the section titled Another Critical Review) experienced where I have returned to TikiWiki over and over as a possible solution for my needs, only to be "cheesed off" by its poor interface. The only issue that this reviewer below mentioned that is not an interface design issue was its slowness. So Marc (Laporte), if you are listening, I would say that the focus for any release after 1.8 should be on the interface.
How I Overcame the Poor Interface Hurdle
One way that I have overcome the hurdle of not understanding how to use TikiWiki was to watch the mini-videos that Siridhar from Hyderabad (India) has put together. You can view the list of available movies at http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php?page=TikiMovies. Once I watched a few of them, the lightbulb came on. Of course there was cheese everywhere, but at least I understood how to navigate around and set things up as an administrator. (K Barrett) Update Feb. 18, 2005 - I have dropped all attempts to get TikiWiki working in any way shape or form. I visited opensourcecms.com recently and found many other CMS's that blow this one away.
Another Critical Review
Because of its rich feature list and high activity on http://www.sourceforge.net , I made 3 attempts of a few days, spaced a few months apart, to use this Wiki productively. While I haven't come across anything that's downright broken, I keep encountering little annoyances that indicate to me a product that's growing faster than its design. By being almost what I want, Tiki keeps cheesing me off to the point of leaving it alone again.
I realize that this comment is not very constructive so far, so I'll try to give some specifics:
To address the comment above: I have noticed the "second click" refresh "effect" in some of the admin panels. This seems to be a CSS issue and not related to the Tiki software. Note that the software comes preloaded with many CSS "styles" - some of these are distributed "as is". I am highly enthusiastic about TikiWiki and I am not easily impressed. Along the same lines as the refresh problem - I had yet another issue with CSS - under the latest Mozilla/MSIE as of March, 2004, text inside textareas was invisible. Perhaps these browsers do not have default fonts for textareas - but as soon as I added a "font-family" to the textarea, everything worked. I'm not sure what measures Tiki developers will take to address these cross-platform browser quirks, but these are webdesigner issues.
As an artist it was a breeze to install. My server has Cpanel pre-installed - all I had to do was go into Fantastico and click "Install TikiWiki" - I never had to change one file permission or edit a single config file. TikiWiki seemed to have been designed just for me. The interface was very intuitive. I agree that many of the features are redundant (you can do just about anything with a Wiki) but it was simple to turn off the features that I didn't need (via the admin interface) adjusting the menu structure accordingly.
I just installed it a few days ago and I'm already addicted and plan to support this project as much as possible. Because Tiki is preloaded with Cpanel/Fantastico, I expect this program to be VERY popular in the near future. At the top of this document, "maintainability" was mentioned - I need to spend more time researching what the best way is to perform backups. I'm afraid to click "dump" - does it backup the Wiki or delete it?
This product is still not perfect. There are a few fancy options (like geographic mapping) that you can activate in the admin panel - and they do not work unless you have time investigate further. I also get some "Sea Surfing" errors - I imagine this is some sort of overlapping session issue. A serious problem I found - if you use brackets in the Wiki for anything other than a URL, the script will crash and you'll lose the text you were editing.
I would strongly recommend not using HTML in this Wiki - I was even able to corrupt some of the database with some simple HTML. Also clicking "Allow HTML" after each edit would be a big pain for any Wiki pages with HTML included. This is a problem. I'm going to tweak the Smarty templates to remove any mention of HTML, as the "allow HTML" option at the bottom of the textarea seems to invite users to use HTML. -- Peter James (http://www.CollectsArt.com)
I have used Tiki extensively, and agree with all of the above criticisms. However, the problem is that there are no other Wikis with TikiWiki's features (see WikiChoicetree). I wish someone would make a wiki with the same features, but without anything except a wiki - and with an emphasis on design. I personally find that specialized tools are almost always better than general purpose do-everything applications. MozillaDotOrg has finally realized this with the release of MozillaThunderbird and MozillaFirefox. I would always prefer using PHPBB over the awful forum interface in TikiWiki. Don't even get me started on their ugly blogs. Why bother? The wiki has an excellent feature set, but it is weighed down by bloat.
Hi!
Thank you for your comments.
We are now eating our own DogFood and this has influenced development and bug fixing. We now have a large enough (and growing) community to use, test and improve stability and usability of our features. Tiki 1.7.1.1 has recently been released and is much better than 1.6 Please try the latest version and report your comments. We are dedicated to making Tiki not only full-featured but also stable, fast and secure.
Best regards,
Marc Laporte http://tikiwiki.org/UserPagemarclaporte
Today is 1 April 2004. I've just been and tried out a load of the tikiwiki implementations (from the links I found on their homepage). I didn't check what versions they were running, so maybe they were previous implementations.
What I saw looked nice and seemed to have a large feature set, but the response speeds I saw on all the sites I looked at (about 5) were enough to put me off this as a possible for the wiki I want to set up. I can't speculate as to why they were so slow, but maybe it's like a Swiss Army knife that's got ALL the tools you could ever want... it's so heavy you just leave it at home. (And I didn't even try out many of the tools, I got bored waiting).
I had tried out TikiWiki some time ago, but the locks to MySQL were too great, and I was looking for something to use with Firebird. Version 1.8 cracked that problem, and I am now running a couple of trial sites without any problem. Speed can be a problem, but careful setup, and a PHP caching package work wonders, I have the database on one machine, and Apache/PHP on a second, and the whole thing is fast and stable. Next problem is to start adding more modules, but the ability to switch on only what you want is great!
Tiki Implementation
"The project naturel is an integration of TikiCMS 1.42, phpAdsNew 2rc2 and jpCache2. This is a public documented case study for these software packages. Goal was to build a theme-powered site full of rich content from a real customer: the printed monthly health magazine Naturel from Dresden/Germany. Its homepage is naturel.biz, the integration team can be found at acado.de."
CategoryPhp CategoryWikiImplementation
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I've been interested in wiki for a couple of years and have just installed tikiwiki. Although powerful and free, it's not intuitive. For example, adding this comment is easy on this wiki but I can't figure out how do this on tikiwiki! http://www.truck1.nl
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With Tikiwiki 1.9 multi-lingual, structured and categorized (topic-mapped) information handling becomes as easy as making an omelette. Just use some eggs and stir, and model your organizational information-interaction with groups and permissions.
--- Caveat: TikiWiki has an incredible case of feature creep... TikiWiki does WAY too much stuff!
Caveat #2: TikiWiki is SpaghettiCode. I've looked at it over and over 'cause it does have some tempting features, but the code base it out of control. Start Simple. Keep your backend and overhead to a minimum.
[AndrewCates] agrees. Avoid Twiki unless you have at least a person full time to be expert on it. But if you do the power is awesome.
[PeterMasiar?]: Andrew, TwikiClone and TikiWiki are different, separate wiki engines. Both are full of features and bad code. I still like Twiki more. :-)
TikiWiki has come on leaps and bounds recently, ever since they started eating their own dog food and started using IRC (irc://irc.freenode.net/#trollparty) for community building etc. I find the developers to be very responsive and helpful. If fact, I'm in Norway now with mose, one of the most active TikiWiki developers and community builders. See http://trollparty.org for more information.
Some cool TikiWiki sites include:
Here is my 2 cents, as this seems to be an open page for commenting. I find tikiwiki has an amazing set of features. So many that for the novice, or someone who has only limited needs it is too much. But if you are looking for a free CMS that is feature rich and flexible, then you might really like it. I find the feature set awesome! Once you get a grip on how many features there are and how they are organized, it becomes quite easy to navigate and customize. But this is definitely IMHO software for someone who is willing and interested in spending time getting to know.
To address some of the issues posted above...
Response Time: I find this to be the biggest issue. I've personally found that RSS feeds and integrating features into one page can create load lag. Also, a good host, one that specializes in hosting tikiwiki I think is worth it. I had a low budget host and I would get blank pages and timeouts all the time. I switched to a host that specializes in tikiwiki and page load times are very fast now. And it did not cost me that much more.
Page Refresh: Someone posted that after making template changes they did not see them. This is a CSS refresh browser issue. When making changes to CSS files you always need to do a full refresh, because browsers cache the CSS. In my experience this is common in most CMS management. Its not a tikiwiki issue.
There is a new version now 1.9, which I have just installed. The permissions settings are much improved... lots of customizability... which is great for creating groups and tiering admin access. I've done some serious customizing in the code to create some of the look and feel but it hasn't been too bad for me to find things in the code...but then again I am not a full on developer or trying to write modules.
Here is my tikiwiki site: http://onnyturf.com.
--- My gripes...
...I want to like TikiWiki so much, but it's just such a let down! The "marketing" pages (and I know it isn't a commercial one) talk a good game, but once installed and run, I wasn't so impressed with some of the features: the way the forums work; the way logins work; the way graphics don't quite work. There are supposedly LaTeX mods for it, but you won't find any info on the main website mentioning that LaTeX has been disabled on it for security reasons. The forums are pretty dead... very hard to get any kind of response or interaction there... it seems like a dead or dying project; which is a great shame, because it sounded so good - but it ain't - not yet anyway.
Somehow, in the great Darwinian process that wikis appear to be going through, I've a feeling that the good ideas in TikiWiki will get poached and done better on more active projects, and leave TikiWiki to its evolutionary cul-de-sac to slowly die.
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