Wiki

The Tiki Community recently completed TikiFest Boston, the seventh code sprint in Boston. More than 20 community met to plan, discuss, and demonstrate Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. Many of the new features included in Tiki 7 were demonstrated, including:

• Unified Search (based on Lucene)
• Tiki-powered web sites on mobile devices, using jQuery Mobile
• theme generator

Extensive work began on the revamp of Tiki Trackers -- a Tiki feature that allows users to create interactive forms and searchable datasets. Tiki 7 will include reorganized and streamlined code, allowing for easier enhancements in the future. Several TikiFesters also participated in a documentation sprint, in an effort to make the Tiki Docs more user-friendly and "catch up" to the current development.

The TikiFesters also joined the Boston jQuery Meet-up group. The event, "Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware and jQuery: the story of a successful integration," featured talks by Nelson Ko and Jonny Bradley. Ko and Bradley provided an overview of Tiki to the group and explained (and demoed) the jQuery integration that will be available in Tiki 7.

The Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware project has released Tiki 6.2. This release includes fixes and updates only. Tiki encourages all sites to upgrade to this latest release. Tiki Community members have made over 240 code contributions for this release. Review the release notes and https://dev.tiki.org/tiki6 for complete information about this release.

Active development continues on the 6.x branch, which will become the LTS (long term support) version, following the release of Tiki 7 (planned for April, 2011). Please see https://dev.tiki.org/Version+lifecycle for more information.

You can download Tiki 6.2 (and all Tiki releases) from https://tiki.org/download.

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the immediate availability of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware 6.1. This update includes over 250 code changes by nearly 20 Tiki Community members. Although these updates are primarily fixes and improvements to existing features, there are several new items that Tiki administrators will be happy to see, including:

• Continued upgrades for WYSIWYG editing
• Default toolbars include a new button to easily select a file (after file upload, if needed), and it's name and link are added to the textarea of that wiki page, forum, blog, etc.
• A new admin panel for Clipperz online password management
• Improvements to CSS inclusion for newsletters
• Many translation updates (from Tiki's interactive translation feature)
• New and improved plugins for third-party media (such as Vimeo, Blip.tv, and YouTube) and generic buttons.
• Updated plugin interface
• New module: Tracker help
• Export or show a wiki page in text-only format (useful to be used with Pretty Trackers)
• Static text fields in Trackers can be sent with wiki-parsed text in notification emails.
• New language.js file added to language folders to assist in translation of text and UI elements used in JavaScript functions.

See the Release Notes and the Tiki6 document for complete details on this release. All Tiki administrators are encouraged to upgrade to this latest release.

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the release of its second promotional video:

How about a *real* multi-language solution?

In this video, recorded in March 2010, Philippe Cloutier, a Tiki consultant, talks about the multilingual features and capabilities of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. He explains the differences between the Tiki multilingual approach and other wiki systems.

Cloutier is a long-time Tiki contributor and programmer. In this video, he discusses the fully integrated multilingual platform that Tiki offers as well as his vision for the future of translation and mutli-lingual wikis.

In addition to facilitating page content translation, the core Tiki interface is available in over 45 languages. These translations are contributed by members of the Tiki Community.

The video can also be viewed below.

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the release of Tiki 6. This version of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware represents hundreds of hours of work by dozens of members of the Tiki Community. Nearly 50 developers contributed more than 1,500 code changes for this release.

In addition to countless tweaks and updates, Tiki 6 includes several new, key features:

• Extensive re-work and improvements to the Tiki blog, comments, spreadsheets and tracker features
• Batch functions (via cron jobs)
• Introduction of re-Captcha
• Expanded support of ccLite community currencies
• Integration with social networks such as Facebook
• Improved WYSIWYG support

Tiki 6 has been designated as the Long Term Support (LTS) version, replacing Tiki 3 LTS. Tiki 3 will reach end of life when Tiki 7.1 will be released (planned for April 2011). See the Project Roadmap for details.

To download Tiki, see https://tiki.org/download. Refer to the Tiki 6 release notes for additional information.

The Beta release of the latest generation of Tiki CMS/Groupware is now available. This 5.0 Beta includes many new features and functionality, including:

• New themes (skins)
• Many fixes and updates
• Beta release of Tiki workspaces
• Beta release of shopping cart and payments

Tiki Community members are encouraged to download and explore this new release. You can obtain the Beta (as well as all other Tiki releases) from http://tiki.org/download. For information on this and future Tiki plans, see http://dev.tiki.org/roadmap.

About Tiki

In this article series by Jeff Orloff and Mizanur Rahman, authors of MediaWiki 1.1 Beginner's Guide , we will learn how to organize our content by creating namespaces that allow us to group pages with similar purposes together, and we learn how to use categories to group pages with similar content together. It also teaches us about redirecting, moving, and swapping pages around so that we can ensure when a visitor comes to our site, they find the information they are looking for because the page titles will match up with page's content.

A couple years ago we decided to use MediaWiki for a wiki implementation at work.  Wikipedia uses MediaWiki for their wiki application so we felt it was the right choice for our needs.  One concern my team had was that MediaWiki didn't come with a rich text editor (no WYSIWYG).

While a number of us may be fine with using wikitext or HTML to edit our wiki pages, I believe the majority in any organization prefers to edit their pages with a friendly user interface similar to that found on their word processor. At the time, we tried a number of solutions but found neither the suggested TinyMCE or FCKeditor implementation integrated that well with mediaWiki.  So for our project we settled with wikEd, an editor that still required users to work with wiki syntax but surprising a very good tool for most users.

During a lunch conversation last week with Deane Barker of Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive, I mentioned my frustrations with MediaWiki not having available a good WYSIWYG solution.  Deane suggested that I look at a more recent implementation of MediaWiki plus FCKeditor. This project is being supported by the developers of FCKeditor themselves.

There is so much that I want to do here at CMS Report, but my time has been limited these past couple weeks.  Some things that have been going on in my world:

1. As a judge for Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Awards, I gave the publishing company my vote on the "Most Promising" CMS.  I dedicated a couple weekends to get the job done and I plan to post my reviews after Packt announces the winners (October 28).
2. I made the decision to drop my reseller account for Dakota Hosting.  The number of clients I host are few and over the past two years I've only been breaking even.
3. My post on Dell's Inspiron Mini 12 netbook brought in quite a bit of traffic to the site.  It looks like I may be a couple weeks off in my prediction for when this new netbook will finally hit the market.
   

Linux.com has a review of DocuWiki.  I've used/seen DocuWiki in the past, but for some reason or another I've never mentioned it here at CMS Report.  DocuWiki runs on a flat file system (no database required) and I've known people to choose it over others due to its easy to use ACL (access control list).