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GSOC 2013 Application Form

New application according to GSOC 2013 questions

Organization id

tikiwiki

Organization Name

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware

Organization description

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is a full-featured, web-based, multilingual (40+ languages), tightly integrated, all-in-one Wiki+CMS+Groupware, Free and Open Source Software (GNU/LGPL), using PHP, MySQL, Zend Framework, jQuery and Smarty. Tiki can be used to create all kinds of Web applications, sites, portals, knowledge base, intranets, and extranets. It is actively developed by a very large international community.

Tiki is the Free and Open Source Web Application with the most built-in features. Highly configurable and modular, all features are optional and administered via a web-based interface.

Major features include a robust wiki engine, news articles, discussion forums, newsletters, blogs, file and image galleries, bug and issue trackers (form generator), a links directory, polls/surveys and quizzes, banner management system, calendar, maps, mobile, RSS feeds, category system, tags, an advanced themeing engine (Smarty), spreadsheet, slideshow, drawing, live support, shoutbox, inter-user messaging, menu generator, advanced permission system for users and groups, internal search engine, external authentication support, and much, much more. It integrates with the free and open source web conferencing BigBlueBlueButton.org for audio/video/chat/screensharing and whiteboard support.



How is Tiki different?

1. Tiki has, by its all-in-the-core model, more built-in features than any other Open Source Web Application (as far as we know!). All features are just clicks away in the admin panel. No need to hunt down/install 3rd party plugins/modules. Because of the all-in-one design, the feature integration is very tight.

2. Tiki is the Wiki Way applied to software development. It is easy to join the community and to contribute. http://dev.tiki.org/How+to+get+commit+access

3. Tiki is a rare hybrid of the CMS & Wiki worlds. Most CMSs are not wiki-centric. And most Wikis are just wikis without the additional CMS functionality.

According to various indicators, Tiki is, community-wise, top-tier amongst wiki software, and towards the top of the second tier as a CMS, after the "big 4" (Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress & Plone). It is of course unique as a blend of both wiki software and more general purpose CMS.

http://www.ohloh.net/tags/wiki
http://www.siteground.com/compare_best_wiki.htm
http://www.ohloh.net/tags/content_management

Organization home page url

http://tiki.org

Main organization license

GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)

Veteran/New

Veteran

Backup Admin

Nelson Ko

user: nelsonkoth

If you chose "veteran" in the dropdown above, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.


During our last GSOC year back in 2009, we encountered success and challenges and have learned and improved our mentoring and project selection since then.

Our most challenging projects were due to mentors that were at arms length in our community. Power users who had a great vision but not enough technical knowhow to truly mentor the student along the way. This added significant overhead to the community and work that wasn't planned for some of our more senior developers.

Our successful projects have been so by choosing projects that were important to our senior developers. This made it easy for them to become active and engaged mentors and gave the students a great experience and solid projects that still live in our code base today and that are used by thousands of our users worldwide.

This is the route that we plan on using this year and will continue to use in the future as we look to grow our relationship with GSOC and work closely with the great students that apply to the program

Our previous participate in GSOC was in 2009. That year we had 4 students whom and all 4 passed.

If you chose "new" in the dropdown above, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

NA

Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2013? What do you hope to gain by participating?

Participating in GSoC 2013 is an opportunity for us to

  • enhance the functionality of Tiki;
  • grow the Tiki coding and support community;
  • provide students the opportunity to gain real-world experience in working with someone else's code. Getting first job experience can be tricky and we subscribe to the motto "flip bits, not burgers";
  • attract students to become active, long-standing contributors to the Tiki community and open source software;
  • expose students to working, learning and sharing knowledge through "community coding";
  • identify and develop community members as mentors to help new contributors;
  • gain visibility for the project;

What is the URL for your Ideas list?

http://dev.tiki.org/GSOC+Ideas+2013

What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tikiwiki-devel

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

irc.freenode.net #tikiwiki

What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year's program? Please be as specific as possible.

We look for a delicate balance of:

  • Technical knowledge
  • Knowledge of the field for each specific project
  • Understanding of free software dynamics
  • Understanding of Tiki, the Wiki Way applied to software development.
  • Ideally, physical proximity with the student
  • Availability and demonstrated commitment to the project as a whole


Also, most of the willing-to-be project mentors are long standing Tiki developers with an astounding knowledge of existing code base. Additionally, a few of them have been part of the past Google Summer of Code events.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

1.) The first thing is to plan properly to minimize the risk by conducting a thorough process to pick the candidate and project. Ideally, we would like the student to have fixed/implemented a couple of bugs/feature requests before being considered for selection.

2.) It is very important to have regular follow-ups. Code produced in the context of the GSOC project will become an integral part of Tiki code (not an optional 3rd party add-on), and thus, the broader community will be involved in setting the requirements, testing, bugfixing, documentation and translation.

3.) Ideally, at least one of the mentors should live geographically close enough to the student to enable face-to-face follow-up meetings if necessary.

4.) If, despite these precautions, a student should disappear, the administrator will intervene and identify the cause(s) of this disappearance. We will follow up/ discuss with the GSOC team to find a solution (Fund another student on the same project? etc.) It is noted that the GSOC initial bonding and project planning phase with the student is so important, and should hopefully avoid any disappearing contributors.

5.) One of the 3 Rules of Tiki is "commit early, commit often". Frequent commits of code will ensure that we will not face a total loss if a student should disappear, and this will also help someone else continue on the work.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

1. This is unlikely because mentors are picked because of their track record of reliability in the community. However, sometimes, unusual circumstances arise. Again, the administrator will be in regular contact with each team to make sure that all teams are intact and functioning well. And we have a list of enough mentors to ensure that we can find replacements if necessary.

2. Since the GSOC project will be an integral part of Tiki code and thus, the whole community will be potentially involved, one of the active community members will fill the void, while attempting to minimize the negative impact for the student and the project.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before and during the program?

1. The student must understand that it's not interesting for the community to have a fly-by-night code-dump. The added functionality will be part of Tiki core and thus, it must fit in harmoniously. Students will be encouraged to use the #tikiwiki irc channel, join and ask questions on the development list, participate in TikiFest, and add themselves as registered editors on the tiki documentation site.

2. We are looking for students who intend to use the project/functionality in a real context. So we'll take this into account when evaluating the proposal. If the student is going to be eating the dogfood, we are confident that they will generate future-proof code.

3. In general, our mentors will ensure that students' projects and deliverables are well-defined and demarcated, while helping the student integrate with the community, so as to provide an excellent and fulfilling learning experience. We will make full use of the GSOC community bonding period to integrate and involve the student.

4.) As previously mentioned, we would like students to be active in the tiki community even before the program starts by fixing/implementing bugs/feature requests. This should get them started with the code and interact with community members in case they should have any doubts regarding code base.

What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?

1. There are several consultancies that use Tiki for customer projects. If the student did a good job and interacted positively with the community, the odds are high for him/her to get Tiki-related work contracts or even a full-time position.

2. Our experience with students is that they tend to propose more they can realistically finish within the GSOC timeframe. Our mentors will encourage the students to continue on things they want to do after GSOC, while ensuring that the student is not overloaded with the pressure of aiming to complete too much during GSOC.

3. Tiki is a very versatile application. Chances are that, having gained familiarity with the software, the student will have a use for it in many future personal or professional projects.

Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.


Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here.

???

/#2013 application ends here
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Keywords

The following is a list of keywords that should serve as hubs for navigation within the Tiki development and should correspond to documentation keywords.

Each feature in Tiki has a wiki page which regroups all the bugs, requests for enhancements, etc. It is somewhat a form of wiki-based project management. You can also express your interest in a feature by adding it to your profile. You can also try out the Dynamic filter.

Accessibility (WAI & 508)
Accounting
Administration
Ajax
Articles & Submissions
Backlinks
Banner
Batch
BigBlueButton audio/video/chat/screensharing
Blog
Bookmark
Browser Compatibility
Calendar
Category
Chat
Comment
Communication Center
Consistency
Contacts Address book
Contact us
Content template
Contribution
Cookie
Copyright
Credits
Custom Home (and Group Home Page)
Database MySQL - MyISAM
Database MySQL - InnoDB
Date and Time
Debugger Console
Diagram
Directory (of hyperlinks)
Documentation link from Tiki to doc.tiki.org (Help System)
Docs
DogFood
Draw -superseded by Diagram
Dynamic Content
Preferences
Dynamic Variable
External Authentication
FAQ
Featured links
Feeds (RSS)
File Gallery
Forum
Friendship Network (Community)
Gantt
Group
Groupmail
Help
History
Hotword
HTML Page
i18n (Multilingual, l10n, Babelfish)
Image Gallery
Import-Export
Install
Integrator
Interoperability
Inter-User Messages
InterTiki
jQuery
Kaltura video management
Kanban
Karma
Live Support
Logs (system & action)
Lost edit protection
Mail-in
Map
Menu
Meta Tag
Missing features
Visual Mapping
Mobile
Mods
Modules
MultiTiki
MyTiki
Newsletter
Notepad
OS independence (Non-Linux, Windows/IIS, Mac, BSD)
Organic Groups (Self-managed Teams)
Packages
Payment
PDF
Performance Speed / Load / Compression / Cache
Permission
Poll
Profiles
Quiz
Rating
Realname
Report
Revision Approval
Scheduler
Score
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search
Security
Semantic links
Share
Shopping Cart
Shoutbox
Site Identity
Slideshow
Smarty Template
Social Networking
Spam protection (Anti-bot CATPCHA)
Spellcheck
Spreadsheet
Staging and Approval
Stats
Survey
Syntax Highlighter (Codemirror)
Tablesorter
Tags
Task
Tell a Friend
Terms and Conditions
Theme
TikiTests
Federated Timesheets
Token Access
Toolbar (Quicktags)
Tours
Trackers
TRIM
User Administration
User Files
User Menu
Watch
Webmail and Groupmail
WebServices
Wiki History, page rename, etc
Wiki plugins extends basic syntax
Wiki syntax text area, parser, etc
Wiki structure (book and table of content)
Workspace and perspectives
WYSIWTSN
WYSIWYCA
WYSIWYG
XMLRPC
XMPP




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