On February 16, the Tiki Community will present the second in  the year-long webinar series. Long-time Tiki Community members and contributors from Citadel Rock Online Communities Inc. will show a newly developed Tiki site that takes advantage of several features introduced in Tiki 8 including the Unified Search and advanced Tracker techniques.

Following the demo, a developer-led discussion will explore several new features planned for upcoming Tiki releases. This is your chance for a sneak-preview of what's coming in Tiki 9! For complete details on the February webinar, see http://tiki.org/February+2012+Webinar .

The latest version of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Tiki 8.1, is now available for immediate download. This release includes many new features and improved functionality, including more than 3,200 code updates by 43 Tiki Community members. Review the Tiki 8 Release Notes and change log for complete information.

Some key highlights of Tiki 8 include:

• Improved internationalization (i18n), including better support for non-English characters in page names and complete translation of German interface items.
• Improved (AJAX) interface for comments and support for Akismet spam protection
• Integration with WebODF to support Open Document Format (ODF) in Tiki Docs.
• Multiple enhancements to site search, such as indexing improvements, caching, and the ability to export search results as an RSS feed
• Several new Tiki plugins
• Update of the template engine from Smarty 2 to 3
• Security fix, first identified by Stefan Schurtz (http://www.infoserve.de/)

This is just a small sample of what's included in Tiki 8.1. Refer to http://doc.tiki.org/Tiki8 for a full list of what's new.

You can obtain Tiki 8.1 (as well as all other Tiki releases) from http://tiki.org/download. The release of Tiki 8 marks the end-of-life for the Tiki 7.x branch. All Tiki Administrators running 7.x are highly encouraged to upgrade to Tiki 8.1.

Tiki 6.x remains the LTS (Long Term Support) version. For information on this and future Tiki plans, see http://dev.tiki.org/Roadmap.

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the release candidate of Tiki 8.0, the next generation of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. For complete details on this release, see the Release Notes and Tiki 8.0 documentation.

Tiki Community members are encouraged to download and explore this new release. Issues and suggestions should be reported on the Tiki Developer site. Tiki Administrators are reminded that this is a pre-release version and should not be used in production environments.

You can download Tiki 8.0 RC directly from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tikiwiki.... You can obtain all other Tiki releases from http://tiki.org/download.

For information on this and future Tiki plans, see http://dev.tiki.org/Roadmap.

Nine years ago this month marks the initial release of the Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware project. Known then as TikiWiki, the initial release (version 0.9) included a mere fraction of the features available today. Since 2002, the Tiki Community has become one of the largest open-source teams in the world and is in the top 2% of all projects on Ohloh.

The Tiki Community is planning two TikiFests (code sprints) in the upcoming months. All members of the Tiki Community, as well as anyone interested in wikis and content management systems (CMS) are invited to join us!

Several members of the Tiki Community will be participating in the Community Leadership Summit (July 23-24) and the O'Reilly OSCON convention (July 25-29), both in Portland, Oregon.

The Community Leadership Summit brings together the leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration to discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community, in an open unconference-style event.

The Open Source Convention allows open source innovators, builders, and pioneers to share their expertise and experience, explore new ideas, and inspire each other. Be sure to visit the Tiki booth (#902) in the Expo Hall. This is your chance to talk with key members of the Tiki Community, learn more about Tiki, and get a highly coveted Tiki T-shirt.

Several Tiki Community members plan to attend all days of the convention and participate in several sessions and workshops.

For more information, visit http://tiki.org/OSCON+2011 .

All members of the Tiki Community are invited to join TikiFest Strasbourg, July 6-9, in Strasbourg, France. This marks the beginning of the 2011 Tiki Summer Tour. During the TikiFest, participants expect to work on several items including extending Tiki's multilingual capabilities, improving the Tiki calendar, and Tiki Suite.

An online component, for Tiki Community members not able to attend in person, will be available via a BigBlueButton web conference. Details will be posted on the http://tiki.org/TikiFestStrasbourg2011 page.

Many participants will stay in Strasbourg to attend RMLL 2011 (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre/Libre Software) and expo, which runs July 9-14. At RMLL, be sure to catch the presentation on Tiki Suite - a collection of open source software to improve collaboration and productivity small and medium-sized organizations. See http://2011.rmll.info/Tiki-Suite(external link) for details.

Unlike other open source applications, the Tiki project is supported entirely by its community. The Tiki Software Community Association, an incorporated non-profit entity that was formed in 2009 as the legal steward for Tiki, is now accepting financial contributions from those who wish to support Tiki monetarily. Donations will be used to support the Tiki community hardware infrastructure, domain fees, TikiFests, and other community expenses.

A financial contribution is not required to join the Tiki Community, become a developer, or use Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. There are many other ways to support Tiki such as becoming active on the support forums, contributing to code development, or writing documentation.

For full details on the new Tiki donation program, see http://tiki.org/Donation