TikiWiki

TikiWiki is one cool product. It's incredibly configurable, customisable and extensible (and many other buzzwords besides). You can get it running in about 10 minutes, but also spend ages getting it "just the way you want".
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TikiWiki is way more than a Wiki - it's a "one size fits all" application that includes countless other features, like forums, FAQs, articles, etc etc. It's a "next generation" application that relies extensively on a backend database to store configuration and data. That makes it a degree more complex than something that uses config files, but it's easily worth it. The fine grained permissions model of Tiki means that you can assign specific abilities to groups of users. Also, the feature enable/disable capability means that you can switch off bits of Tiki you don't want, removing the need to maintain permissions or content in them.

If you're prepared to get a bit dirty playing with the SMARTY templates, then you can really get Tiki to do what you want. Out of the box, Tiki looks good - it makes use of interchangeable, stylish HTML templates and style sheets. These use JavaScript to enrich the browsing experience. Personally, not being much of a JavaScript fan, I stripped out much of this from every day use, simplifying the screen layouts and "branding" it as it needed to be. It's really pretty straight forward to do: First, create a CSS file with the name of your new style. Then, create a directory with the same name, and copy a few files into it. Edit those files as you want to make them look as you like. If you need any other template files modified (of which there are many), then copy those into your directory and edit them. Very easy, although not something you'll want to do using the Tiki browser access to the templates.

The layers of Tiki application (PHP, Pear, Smarty, MySQL etc) make it quite slow. On a pretty much dedicated machine of reasonably decent speed, pages were getting created in about 2-3 seconds. That doesn't sound too great, seeing as it's not scaled up at all. However, the addition of PHP Accellerator gets those times down to about 0.5 seconds. Incidentally, PHP Accellerator is another great application, which is simple to install (unzip it, add one line to php.ini, and that's all you need to do).

All in all, if you've got a web site, and you want to provide numerous interactive features, then Tiki is really good. It's got to be worth a few minutes of your time to try it out (there's an online demo, or try it yourself in just a few minutes).

Submitted by coofercat on Mon, 2003-06-16 01:24

Comments

TikiWiki

can u make me a ciara layout for my page.

Submitted by chris (not verified) on Fri, 2005-04-29 19:21.