TikiWiki Web Hosting

TikiWiki Web Hosting

Tiki Content Management System or Groupware which is more commonly termed as TikiWiki; is an open source Content Management System (CMS) / Geospatial Content Management System (GeoCMS) / Groupware web application enabling websites and portals on the internet and on intranets and extranets. It is available under GNU LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) which is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation. It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License.

The initial release of TikiWiki, version 0.9 (code named “Spica”), was in October 2002. It was primarily the development of Luis Argerich (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Eduardo Polidor (São Paulo, Brazil), and Garland Foster (Green Bay, WI, United States). Over 300 developers and translators have contributed to TikiWiki since then.

TikiWiki is a complete Groupware/CMS solution and is a customizable modular multi-feature package. Each component or related features can be enabled or disabled as well as easily customized by the administrator. TikiWiki extends the customization to the user with selectable skins / themes. The project is hosted on SourceForge, and was the July 2003 Project of the Month.

The major components provided by TikiWiki can be divided into the following categories:

1. Content Creation and Management Tools: These key features allow the administrators as well as users to create, display, and maintain online-accessible content of all kinds, including text, binary data, images, links, and much more.
2. Content Organization Tools and Navigation Aids: These key features allow the administrators as well as users to organize, structure, and present content in a manageable and organized way.
3. Communication Tools: This category of features allow the administrators and users to communicate with each other (and the outside world) by means of numerous media, including internal messaging, voice telephony, data interchange, and many more.
4. Configuration Tools and Administration Tools: These features enable administrators (and users who have been given the appropriate permissions) to configure and administer all aspects of a TikiWiki site.

This software package offers some very robust and highly utilizable features thereby its functionality. Even after upgrading the software; the features do not get broken because a very large number of features are included in the main base code. It also permits tight integration of the various features and makes it easier for content re-use. The Wiki syntax works throughout the application. Mentioned below is a brief overview of its key features:

1. Content Features and Management Tools:

• Newsreader: NNTP newsreader
• Webmail: Users get web based access to their POP3 e-mail accounts
• Friendship Network: Users can identify other users as their friends.
• HTML Pages: Static and dynamic HTML content. HTML can be used in wiki pages. This is a separate feature.
• Task: To do list. Can send tasks to other users. Also includes shared group tasks.
• Notepad: Users can write, upload, download and read notes.
• Inter user messages: Enable users to send internal messages to each other. A broadcast is a message sent to many users, the message can be sent to a Tiki group or to all users (if permissions are ok).
• Articles: Fast-breaking news, announcements. Submission & approval. Topics & Types.
• Shoutbox: Provide a graffiti box on the site’s home page.
• Contact: Basic form from visitor to admin
• File Gallery: Computer files, videos or software for downloading
• Wiki: Collaboratively authored documents with history of changes.
• Featured Links: Simple menu system which can optionally add an external web page in an iframe
• Flash games
• Survey: Questionnaire with multiple choice or open ended questions.
• Newsletters for registered users
• Forum for Online discussions on a variety of topics. Threaded or flat. File attachments, etc
• Image Gallery: Collections of graphic images for viewing or downloading
• Navigable, interactive maps with user-selectable layers (requires mapserver)
• Use of Google Maps interactively inside Tiki, added to 1.9.4
• Users upload files and store them in their tiki personal space, they can then download the files.
• Slideshows by using more than one title bar in the page. You can also make slideshows from a structure.
• MyTiki: Provide content organization and communication tools for registered users. Bookmark, User Preferences, Watch, User Menu, Task, Inter-User Messages, User Files, Notepad and Mini Calendar.
• Datasheets with calculations and charts
• Frequently asked questions and answers
• Quiz
• Directory: User-submitted Web links
• Calendar: Events calendar with public, private and group channel
• Online diaries or journals
• Tracker: Facts and figures storage & retrieval. A forms & database generator, with reporting.
• Live support and chat
• Charts
• WebHelp: The generated webhelp is a static representation of the structure with a js tree that can be used to navigate the structure and a search function, print function, history and some other gizmos.

2. Navigation Features:

• Category: Global category system. Items of different types (wiki pages, articles, tracker items, etc) can be added to one or many categories. Categories can have permissions.
• Menus: Menu items can be filtered by permission, by group or if a feature is turned on or off. Also works with phplayersmenu for nice dynamic menus.
• Module: Boxes of content, typically on the left & right of portal-styles sites. Very useful for navigation & content re-use. 90+ modules available in Tiki 1.9.x Modules administrators can make many more predefined modules available and create their own using HTML.
• Structure: Ability to create hierarchically organized navigation aids for Wiki pages, and also allow printing all pages in the structure and in the same order.
• Wiki 3D: Morcego 3D network browser Java applet
• Site Identity: This feature helps an admin to simplify the customization process of his/her site.
• Custom Home: If enabled, a customized page will serve as the home page for the Tiki. Custom home page by default group is also possible.
• Meta Tags: Administer Meta tags via the admin panel (no FTP required).
• Freetags
• Search engine friendly: If using Apache, rename _htaccess to .htaccess to get Short URLs.
• Book marks: Allow users to bookmark internal or external pages, create folders and organize their personal bookmarks in folders. Bookmarks can be cached if that option is enabled. A module is provided to let the users see their bookmarks, navigate through them, and add new bookmarks.
• User Menu: Add personal items to the User Menu section in the application menu.

3. Transversal Features:

• Compression: Transparently compress pages easily and quickly if the requesting browser supports this feature.
• 35 built-in themes. Easy to add more or to create your own
• Generates RSS feeds and RSS feeds can be included in Tiki.
• Interaction with popular external softtware, services or websites like Google video, Google Maps, YouTube, Skype, Google AdSense, Mindmap and many more.
• Tiki is translated in 30 languages. Handles multilingual navigation & content. Can also link to Babelfish.
• Js calendar: date & time picker optional in calendar and trackers.
• Quick feedback available for many features (wiki pages, articles, blogs, etc)
• Mobile and Voice Tiki: Provide voice-based browsing capability and WAP / PDA / i-mode / etc for Web-enabled cell phones.
• Receive an email when an item is updated
• Mods: A new tool for distribution, install, upgrade and removal of tikiwiki components, also called mods.
• Site-wide statistics for many features. Referrer stats and search stats also available.
• Insert, track, and manage advertising banners.
• Rating: Lets users vote on wiki pages & tracker items
• Search: internal search engine which indexes through many features
• Contribution: Allow selecting, reporting and exporting the type of contributions of your users. (only available for tikiwiki = 1.10+)
• Score: This feature is a game to motivate people to participate in the community. Users are given points for things they do in the site, like writing an article, reading an article, starting a new topic in forum, voting a poll, etc.
• Karma: Vote comments from 1 (poor) to 5 (very cool)
• Mail-in: Submit Wiki pages or articles via e-mail.
• Web Accessibility
• Generate a PDF version

4. Text Area Features:

• Plugin: About 50 Wiki plugins extend the function of wiki syntax with more specialized commands. It is fairly simple to create plug-ins.
• Wiki Syntax: Apply formatting without learning & using HTML.
• Dynamic Content System: Bloc of content which can be reused and programmed (timed).
• Quick Tags
• CODE and Flash plug-in.
• Drawing engine inside wiki pages using JGraphPad, a powerful java drawing applet.
• External Wikis: Create links easily with other wikis.
• A table of content can be generated automatically from a list of headers.
• Cookie: Taglines drawn randomly from tagline database
• If Hotwords are enabled; Wiki pages are parsed and some words are automatically converted to HTML links.
• External URLs can be cached inside TikiWiki.
• Content Template: Choice of pre-filled texts for Wiki pages, articles, newsletters and html pages.
• Polls.
• Dynamic Variables: Pieces of text which can be reused throughout Tiki.
• Interesting Smileys
• The Copyright Management System (or ©MS) is a way of licensing your content, typically under and open or free content license.
• Spellcheck feature
• Plugin Module: Insert a module in a Wiki page, an article, etc

5. Administration Features:

• Permissions: Different rights can be assigned to groups. (ACLs).
• Theme Control feature
• Cacheing: Tiki uses the Smarty template engine’s built-in cache.
• User Administration: Registration, Login & Banning
• Group: Groups can be included in groups to inherit permissions.
• Edit CSS
• Send/receive objects to and from other Tiki-powered sites
• Intertiki: Authenticate users based on users’ data from external tiki.
• External Authentication: Can use LDAP (Active Directory), PAM, Auth, Http web server or CAS. In 1.10 Shibboleth.
• Action log allows the administrator to follow what a user is doing on a single or multiple users, groups or categories basis. This feature is new to Tiki 1.10.
• Banning feature enables the administrator to block access from individual IPs or ranges of IPs.
• Phpinfo: Add a phpinfo link to check php installation in the admin menu.
• Tiki-backup.php is to make a backup of your data via Tiki. However, the use of this feature is not reccomnded and users are instead advised to use phpMyAdmin.
• Edit SMARTY templates feature.

6. Advanced features for programmers:

• Workflow: Galaxia is an open source activity-based Workflow engine. http://workflow.tikiwiki.org.
• The integrator feature enables the import of external HTML pages into Tiki.
• SQL plug-in: Display select queries in your wiki pages
• Debugger Console for programmers

Tikiwiki software is actively maintained as well as developed by a group of active community members contributing as volunteers.
The minimum requirements to be met before installing TikiWiki are mentioned below
Webserver Requirements:
Tikiwiki should run on any webserver (such as Apache) that supports PHP and meets the following minimal requirements:

• 512 MB Ram
• 100 megs free storage
• At least 32 Megs of Memory allocated for PHP.

Database Dependencies:

• MySQL 4.0.x (or higher): For MySQL 4.1.x, use Tiki 1.9.x (full support)
• For MySQL 5.x, use Tiki 1.9.3+.
• Postgres (partial support)
• SQLite (partial support)
• Oracle (partial support)
• Sybase (partial support)
• MSSQL (partial support)

PHP: Tiki requires PHP 4.1+ (if you want to use LDAP authentication you need 4.3.2+), version 4.2+ is recommended. For PHP 5.0, you must use Tiki 1.9.1 (or higher) with the MySQLi extension.

• libxml must be enabled
• ctype must be enabled for tw >=1.10
• mbstring is a plus if working with a language that needs it.
• PHP 4.1.2 has a known session bug and should not be used.

Optional requirements:

• Use either GD Library 1.5 (or higher) or ImageMagick. ImageMagick is included, by default with PHP 4.3+
• GraphViz.
• PHP 4.2+
• php-xml
• Mapserver 4.6+
• Use the Apache Rewrite Rules to create shorter or custom URLs.

TikiWiki is an international project, providing translations of the interface in several languages. While the default interface language is English, TikiWiki is designed to support any language encodable with UTF-8.