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The admin area is a mess!!
Maybe it's very powerful, but I think they have to improve accessibility and usability..
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In answer to: Fidelis C Obodoeze
Hi!
You should try the tikiwiki forums at tikiwiki.org, or the users mailing list. I'm sure that there you will find someone who will give you that step-by-step guide.
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TikiWiki seems to be an ideal solution for a complex community portal but I am scared by the complaints about its ambiguity in installation. Can somebody out there give me a clear step-by-step guide on how to install TikiWiki 3.3 on my XAMPP server?
I will appreciate it.
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I tried it. Took an age to upload. Huge footprint. Plus there is a bit of a learning curve. Agree with others, it's quite frustrating to set up.
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If you can present an outline-style of navigation, then this is a good choice. I am still trying to figure it out.
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TikiWiki is the best CMS out there. I have been developing in it since 2002. I have rarely had to add features, its all there. The CSS and themes make it really easy to use and change layout, plus page templates, widgets, video integration and layered permissions.
TikiWiki trumps Plone, Drupal, any other CMS hands down.
50 sites and counting, all built on TikiWiki.
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Ok I tested this a little bit.
The good points:
There is a lot of functionality to this product. You can add mods and such with the click of a check mark, the forums work decently as do the wiki, photogaleries and such. As far as functions go, this has a lot going for it. It is also very fast and responsive. I noticed also that it uses css themes, so theming should be incredibly easy.
The bad points:
The way it is set up is extremely cluttered. I'd suggest a more uniformed approach, with an admin back end that separated the different functions in pages than tabs. I would add the administrative functions of thinks like forums and wiki into for example an admin page for the forum set up all tied into the forum options, instead of on the forum page itself and in the nav menu as is now. Really, the way everything is thrown together is confusing to navigate, and I have navigated my fair share of CMS'es. It can be done, but it should be neater and more organized. I'd say this is this project's weakest point, something that should be improved upon.
I am intrigued by this cms, and it comes close to matching the cms I use and love now. So over all, good job. Fix up the navigation and clutter and this would be gold.
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Hi "tikiwiki long on features, short on data integration":
I understand what you say. However, MediaWiki and TikiWiki target different type of communities. Both with their strengths, and both with weaknesses. For what you say, you need more a Mediawiki type of software product. Glad you found it. Whenever you are in a group/project where "just a wiki" is not enough, you'll be welcome to help make other products (such as TikiWiki, or whatever else suits you the best) a bit better.
I'm glad with TikiWiki product and community, and the work being done, since it suits my needs of many many projects, groups, communities.
I'm very glad the MediaWiki exists, since it suits very well the need to produce a huge encyclopedia (or encyclopedia-like web sites).
And I would be very pleased when TikiWiki and/or MediaWiki support the WikiCreole markup, which in my honest opinion deserves to be "the standard" no wiki markup. You can google for it a bit, and you'll know why.
Cheers, and long life to free software communities and products! :-)
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Oh my god, it's UGLY UGLY UGLY !!!! and confusing too. Clearly developed by technicians.
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Tikiwiki has lots of features but they are quite poorly integrated. Everything including configuration files should be wiki pages, especially since the permission system already makes those configurations that shouldn't be seen, easy to hide. It's social features are also sadly lacking, they are nowhere near as reliable and readable as mediawiki, facebook or most other wikis, which make edit summary lines something akin to tweets (twitter), letting you know what others are up to right now.
Its worst misfeature however is "its own" data format that is incompatible with mediawiki's. If only they would ditch their worthless format in favor of extending mediawiki's (things like ==+ HEADER2 instead of the !! nonsense) they would find a huge number of people want the mobile, maps, blog-like comments, RSS inclusion, calendar and so on...
But we all know mediawiki, thanks to Wikipedia, will be around in twenty years, and it's data format will always be supported. We have no such assurance about tikiwiki and so its a dangerous data jail. You can always get your data out of mediawiki format into something else, but you can't be sure you can get it out of a minor wiki's format - ever.
Then there's the naming problem. Everything in the known universe has been named already in mediawiki's admissible title characters, in fact it's been named in every language humans speak almost. And they've argued over it for weeks or months sometimes to pick the exactly correct neutral name to avoid conflicting or appearing biased or overlap, and they're constantly improving this massive ontology. In the meantime over in tikiwiki-land, I am all alone with my naming scheme, and no one else will ever help me with what things should be named unless I pay them. That is not fun.
Finally if I want to spread some page around from mediawiki I just cut and paste, say into a Wikipedia talk page on that topic. From tikiwiki? No such convenience. If I've got to have people updating other wikis to spread the word, they'll have to learn mediawiki no matter what. So using tikiwiki just slows them down and confuses them. No fun.
Please, tikiwiki team, ditch that failed data format and make yourself a better front end for mediawiki format data. It won't be difficult, make that a goal of 3.0.
And if you think having a flexible parser that supports several formats including mediawiki solves this problem, you simply have not understood what I've said. There is no way that any obscure parser used only by a very few people is going to be supported well enough and have the bugs all worked out. If a native data format is retained at all it becomes a huge suck of talent and time away from what we really need: a better user interface to our mediawiki data.
Tikiwiki obviously has all the UI geeks but mediawiki has all the data management geeks. And guess which one I want writing my CMS?
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I'm not sure what to make of comments like this in view of the active community support at tikiwiki.org and something like 950 pages of docs at doc.tikiwiki.org:
:I found that TikiWiki has limited online instructions for this ,(and the module in not very intuitive)and the community support for this task is negligible.
I don't recall seeing a post about the adsense module recently in the forums. Did you try posting there?
Also, the documentation pages are a work in progress. We would appreciate any specific feedback if you find them inaedequate, etc.
About the Adsense module, did you see [doc.tikiwiki.org]?
Thanks for trying Tiki but, again, it is a large collaborative effort and it's best to give feedback directly so any problems can be solved.
-- Gary
themes.tikiwiki.org
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As a person with low-to-middle level experience and expertise, I have to say I have an initial not-great experience. I did easily set the site up, via CPanel Fantastico installer; and it works fine, so far, but when I went to do what should be a simple task, ie add adsense code, I found that TikiWiki has limited online instructions for this ,(and the module in not very intuitive)and the community support for this task is negligible. Considering how widely used adsense is, these seems like NOT a good sign for TikiWiki. 2 hours later, I am giving up. I tried to log-in to TikiWiki, and its says I need to activate cookies, but my cookies ARE activated.
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Hi 'Some Call Me Tim',
I thank you for taking the time to evaluate Tiki and to share your thoughts. However, I disagree strongly with many of your comments and certainly your conclusions. I especially object to your comment 'and would not recommend it to anyone'. How could a project as popular as Tiki not be good 'for anyone'?
I have prepared a general page which addresses common concerns / questions about Tiki (which covers many of your comments):
http://marclaporte.com/TikiSucks
Here are some replies to your other comments:
'Advertised compatibility with Postgres is just wrong' -> OK. I see some bug reports http://dev.tikiwiki.org/tiki-searchindex.php?highlight=PostgreS&where=pages&search=go
Many CMSs offer only MySQL. Besides, this should be easy to fix for someone with 20 years of experience :-)
'Modifying the system can only be done through annoying hacks/patches' -> What type of feature would you like to add? Depending on the answer, there are several ways to add functionality to Tiki:
A great deal of modifications can be done using the templates. Tiki uses the Smarty template engine and some basic programming is possible there. You can save these custom *.tpl files in their own 'theme' to override the default templates, and to make sure future upgrades are easy.
http://themes.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php?page=Template+Overview
Also, new functionality can be achieved in many ways:
Mods: http://mods.tikiwiki.org
Plugins: http://tikiwiki.org/PluginsList
New feature: http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Hello+World
Advanced developers can create their own custom applications from the Galaxia Workflow Engine:
http://workflow.tikiwiki.org/
In my experience, Tiki is very easy to upgrade. I have used other 'modular' systems before and it was more complex to upgrade because the 'core' and the 'modules' were not released at the same time, and this adds burden to the site admin to manage versioning (which is problematic especially for less technical users)
'In forums, comments always have a 'Vote' and a 'Score' option' -> I just fixed this and it will be in Tiki 1.9.8.
'Integrator plug-in...' -> Integrator is a powerful but complex feature to integrate apps. Again, this should be fairly easy to fix for someone with 20 years of experience :-) For people with less technical knowledge, I recommend using 'featured links' instead. This is a simple iframe of an external site.
'Menu configuration is terrible' -> That is the default system menu. It is designed to be smaller or larger depending on how many features are activated. You can and should create your own menus with the menu generator. You can also change ' Maximum number of records in listings:' at tiki-admin.php?page=general
'What Tiki CMS needs is not a complete rewrite. I mean, why? There are other projects that could better use good developers' time. My next project will be on Drupal, which so far seems elegant and well designed. We'll see how long that lasts. :)'
I don't know if this is your case, but often, people with strong programming skills underestimate the unique challenges & dynamics of an Open Source project, especially a community-development project like Tiki. Some people come from a commercial background and think that they can manage an Open Source project the same way they managed a team of paid staff to work on a project. Some will design something which supposed to be 'superior', but it is too complex for people to use & participate to.
Tiki is designed so many people with different skill levels can participate and improve the application. 190+ people have contributed to Tiki via CVS so the model has proven that it works and it scales. So somewhere, somehow, all these people thought it was a worthy enough project. Do you know a lot of Open Source projects with as many contributors? And countless others have helped with tech support, testing, documentation, etc. For people that do get involved in development, they want a friendly place, access to other people to bounce ideas & ask for some help. Most of them also want to be able to contribute back.
While I disagree with your conclusions and many things you brought up, I do thank you for taking the time to write your detailed message. You shared your opinion in a polite way while expressing serious concerns about Tiki. I hope you will find the ideal system for your needs. Most people reading this forum are not 'high level software engineer/architect with 20 years of experience'. They are reading this site to select a CMS or a groupware. I am worried they will be scared off by your (IMHO unfair) comments.
For many years, I have read criticisms / concerns / etc about Tiki's design. It won't scale, it will implode, etc, There was a lot of FUD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUD However, here we are. Tiki is 4 years old. It's a mature, very powerful application, with a large community of contributors, with tons of features and which is used on tens of thousands of websites & Intranets.
Of course, there are a lot of things to improve and there will always be. Please see: http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Features to see if Tiki is a good application for your needs. Remember: if you don't need a feature, don't activate it. However, if you need it in the future, it's only a few clicks away.
And remember also, Tiki is open source and open development. YOU can participate to its future.
Best regards,
M ;-)
Marc Laporte
Project admin
Tiki CMS/Groupware
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I'm a high level software engineer/architect with 20 years of experience. I just completed installing and am currently running TikiWiki 1.9.4, and in conclusion, if I had to do it all over again, I would have chosen another CMS. The parts of it that work seem to work well enough, and we will continue using TikiWiki for the immediate future. However, I apologize to the developers who have put many hours of work into this project for what I'm about to say. I honestly think this is a project that has a dead-end code base and would not recommend it to anyone. I wish that someone had warned me how inflexible and brittle the code was before I wasted time setting it up here.
It has a lot of stock features that are nice, if you happen to want exactly what it offers and no more. It seems to lack anything like a plug-in architecture. If you need to do anything that isn't in the current feature set, you'll need to hack the main code base yourself, meaning that the next security update patch will be a nightmare. What this means to non-programmers is that only features that get adopted into the main code base are going to be stable--that's why it ships with so many features. It HAS to in order to support them all. Other CMSs can have plug-ins that don't touch main code, so you have more plug-in developers.
Here are my specific comments:
* Advertised compatibility with Postgres is just wrong. It sorta-kinda works, but things like the MyTiki page and others are completely broken. Based on this, I wouldn't trust claimed compatibility with anything but MySQL.
* Modifying the system can only be done through annoying hacks/patches: The plug-in architecture is poor. Trying to be constructive, I'd say that there aren't enough hooks. In order to add search functionality, for instance, I had to modify core source code. In Drupal, e.g., you just create a search hook and it gets called along with the rest.
* The architecture in general is poor: Relational databases are meant to have each data item in one place, and then reference it via its index. In the dozens of Tiki tables that reference a user name, it's a text field in each one. This means that there's a massive function (many pages) to change a user's name that must know about each table that references a user name. Not only is this slow, it's dangerous: Adding a new table and forgetting to update this function could get your database into an inconsistent state. It's just a bad practice.
* While there seem to be plenty of options I can turn on or off, some features that I don't really need or want are not configurable: In forums, comments always have a 'Vote' and a 'Score' option, which is inappropriate for my uses, for instance.
* The 'Integrator' plug-in came with default settings for reading Doxygen files that were just wrong. It looks like the settings were entered into the database wrong--instead of $1 and $2 for parameters, it listed 1 and 2 (undecorated).
* Menu configuration is terrible: The preconfigured menu breaks down into 18 slow-to-load pages of
options, most of which are disabled when the feature doesn't exist.
We aren't really pushing the Tiki CMS to its limits here--small (private) user base, with only a minority of features in use. To have run into this many configuration problems and limitations for our uses speaks volumes for me.
What Tiki CMS needs is not a complete rewrite. I mean, why? There are other projects that could better use good developers' time. My next project will be on Drupal, which so far seems elegant and well designed. We'll see how long that lasts. :)
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Tikiwiki is a very powerful, feature filled wiki based cms, however it will take a while to learn. Tikiwiki 1.9.4 is great for supporting group deliberation in a wiki, it is faily easy to create private group pages and permissions are fully customizable.
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