Jean-Marc Libs

The Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware software community obviously uses Tiki itself for collaboration and knowledge management. Yet, many other software tools or infrastructures are used. I will review and explain how and why.

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware was initially released in 2002 and is still very much alive with a vibrant community. We obviously want to use Tiki itself for collaboration and knowledge management as much as possible, but the real situation is, we use a lot more tools. We leverage the fact that Tiki is part of wikisuite by using the other wikisuite software, but these still don't cover everything we use. The reasons vary from old habits to convenience or improved efficiency and they are different for each collaboration tool. I will review them and explain why we use them and how useful they are to us. Also, I will mention our plans for the future.

I will demonstrate an easy and fast way of configuring Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware for the purpose of having a central repository for a knowledge base. I will also explain how to manage permissions for various use cases, how to separate different topics, how to access stored knowledge.

This presentation will start with a minimal Tiki site and show how to build structures of pages and file repositories with a knowledge base in mind. This will rely on a concrete real-life working example of a site for collaboration between a freelancer/company and their various separate customers with different projects.

I will show how to configure permissions for: * a publicly visible and editable knowledge base; * separate knowledge bases which are restricted to groups of users and invisible to others; * intermediate scenarios with groups of editors and groups of read-only viewers.

I will show the basics of how to make the knowledge accessible, searchable, navigable and allow comments from people who can only view it.

I will provide hints about more powerful approaches using Tiki's inbuilt user-configurable database feature.

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware (Tiki for short) is the Free and Open Source Web Application with the most built-in features. It also has a very open developer community policy which supports "the wiki way of writing software". This emphasizes some common challenges, especially in terms of debugging and bug reporting.

This talk is about the infrastructure at show.tiki.org which we have set up for bug reporters to showcase the bugs on a running Tiki instance.

This project was started during the April 2013 Ottawa TikiFest where we pondered ways of improving Tiki by improving our debugging process. We have already had a bug tracker for ages, but too many bugs stay unresolved because they are not understood or not reproduced by the volunteer developers.

So we started this new project to facilitate bug reporting and solving. It can be quite time consuming to read and understand some of the bug reports (They are often edge cases). Experience shows that if you can demonstrate a bug (and for a regression, pinpoint which commit introduces it), things can get fixed quickly.

This talk will:

• Explain what issues this infrastructure solves
• Explain the benefits to bug reporters and how they use it
• Explain the benefits to developers and how they use it
• Explain the scope, early requirements, technical choices and plans for the future
• Describe the underlying technical infrastructure
• What was postponed/is planned for version 2.

This is a very successful project which brought many benefits to the Tiki community. Both users and coders appreciate it. It hosts 200 live sites after 4 months of existence. There will definitely be a version 2.

We feel it could be of benefit to other web-based projects. It might be either reproduced from general principles by rewriting and adapting our code or, if there is interest, it could be branched off Tiki and expanded as a more generic solution for any wiki (or web-based) application.