Support/BenefitsOfUpgradingToTiki4

Started : 2009-08-30

This page is to list examples about David's question: "How much better things will be once we’re there?"

Being in sync with the Tiki community (quick access to answers)

Now, it's tricky for Tiki community members to help because it's difficult to remember how the code was two years ago.

We can say that a problem doesn't exist in Tiki3 or Tiki4, but it's very difficult to share which exact commit or combination of commits solved an issue. And it's possible (probable) that some bugs are caused by the current "FrankenTiki". Difficult to tell.

Volunteers

Several Tiki community members have volunteered.

Gary & luci are working on porting theme to Tiki4.

test site: Ex.: http://sumo.ourwiki.net/ Notes: Support/UpgradeToTiki4/ThemeCoordination

Making Tiki stronger

By upgrading and upstreaming, Tiki becomes stronger and can get more done, which will be available to SUMO.

http://dev.tikiwiki.org/SUMO+Benefits+for+Tiki

PDO

Now default in 4.0

Database Upgrade revamped

Now easy to manage local database configuration patches http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Database+Schema+Upgrade

Profiles

Profiles permit to store and share different configurations, feature sets, permissions schemes and pre-made examples of some of the more complicated features. Profiles was released in Tiki3.

For configuration change management

Similar to database patches above, they can be used for SUMO to make sure a configuration change on Staging is not forgotten on production.

Same thing for the various sites Fennec, Thunderbird, etc. It makes it easy to deply a config change everywhere.

Open Source Support profile

We can make a SUMO profile which is an adaption of the Software Project profile.

Thus, attract more developers and accelerate development.

Plugin Alias

http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Plugin+Alias

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Style+Guide

So : {TAG(tag=kbd)}text{TAG} becomes {KBD()}text{KBD} {DIV(class=button,type=>span)}text{DIV} becomes {BUTTON()}text{BUTTON}

Page alias

http://doc.tikiwiki.org/alias This permits redirects without creating artificial pages.

So alternate titles/keywords can be used for better "findability".

i18n

Massive improvements, over this period. Here are some that come to mind.

• Changing the language of a page is still possible, but somewhat hidden because it was causing User issues (users accidentally changing the language of the page, when trying to translate)
• Users can set all (1 to n) the languages they understand in their user preferences.
• Architecture document (pdf)
• Cross Lingual Wiki Engine Paper (pdf)
• http://doc.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php?page=TikiWiki+4.0#Machine_Translation

Plugin UI

There is a pop-up helper, started in Tiki3, better in Tiki4

Theme system totally revamped

In version 3, whole theme organization was revamped. (Tableless, etc). The good news is that new themes are easier to make, more accessible, etc.

Site identity has also progressed (Site title, subtitle, footer, etc.) that make it easy to put things as part of site preferences.

The only negative point is that the old themes do not survive the upgrade http://themes.tikiwiki.org/Theme+Issues+when+Updating+to+Tiki3.0

For SUMO, luci & Gary have volunteered to port the theme. You can see their progress here: http://sumo.ourwiki.net and Support/UpgradeToTiki4/ThemeCoordination

Theme options

Useful to have small adaptations to a theme without duplicating the whole css.

jQuery

jQuery has been added as optional javascript framework, which allows many nice effects on several parts of Tiki. It is an experimental, optional feature of Tiki 3.0, and in 4.0 it will be the default, always on Javascript framework.

http://doc.tikiwiki.org/jQuery

Workspaces

Ease of making sub-sections within a single instance of Tiki and make it easier to share information. If Fennec and Firefox have a lot of documentation in common, it would be easier to share. So perhaps Fennec support site could be a workspace within SUMO. Fennec may or may not be the appropriate use of Workspaces, but it will be useful for sure. Ex.: a workspace for documentor, a workspace for localizers. And each wiki page can be shared amongst many workspaces.

Please see http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Workspace+Roadmap

Text Area editor improvements

Collaboration on initiatives such as: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Support/Editor:PRD http://ui.tikiwiki.org/Text+area+editing+helper

More stability

1.10 was never released. It was renamed 2.0 and then released. Before each release, there are hundreds of bug fixes and minor tweaks.

SUMO should rather stay in stable zone. For example, start using 4.1 and upgrading to 5.1

Once a release goes .0, all future commits are reviewed by our http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Quality+Team, with 3 of our most experienced developers. We would like to invite a SUMO developer to the quality team and this insure that there will be no regressions for SUMO (and thus making keeping in sync easier).

Tons of new features

Surely there are many things that SUMO could use :-)

1. http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tiki2
2. http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tiki3
3. http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tiki4
4. http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Roadmap

Zend Framework

Starting in 3.0, Tiki bundles Zend Framework and uses some of it.

http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Zend+Framework

Other changes

Perhaps use inclusion of wiki pages, instead of dynamic content (need to make sure they are excluded from search results)