Support/PlatformEngineering

Overview

We need to come up with a plan for engineering a sustainable platform for SUMO. The goals are:

• Evaluate the updated Tiki platform for suitability as a codebase that can continue to grow and improve with SUMO and with other projects using it for support
• Improve code platform quality to
  • Increase robustness and performance
  • Increase developer happiness
  • Reduce time to implement new features

Tiki Upgrade

As [[1]] in Q3 2009, Q1 2010 will be occupied with getting SUMO running on Tiki 5.1. We have both a high level plan and a detailed implementation plan.

Option 1: continue with Tiki

Refactoring

We need to identify which parts of Tiki we plan to rewrite or refactor. The criteria for choosing these are as follows:

• Existing poor code quality and/or fragility
• Impact of refactoring: choose areas that will have the biggest impact for users and developers
• Ease of refactoring: While this would never be the only criteria, there is certainly value in choosing low hanging fruit

Option 2: redevelop SUMO platform code

The outcome of the option matrix we developed in Q3 2009 ([[2]]) was that none of the other existing platforms look significantly better than TikiWiki. If we go down this path we would be looking at reimplementing SUMO from scratch.