Adaptability
Tiki is the FOSS Web Application with the most built-in features and while it suprises some, Tiki is very adaptable to change.
- Major releases every 6 to 8 months, to take advantage of new technologies. Tiki is one of the FOSS Web Application with the fastest release cycle
- With the underlying technology Zend Framework, Smarty and jQuery
- With browsers and standards. Ex.: HTML5
- All-in-one code base, so major changes can be done, while having full access to the whole code base, and not having to worry about breaking hundreds or thousands of third-party extensions.
- Every Tiki site goes through the same upgrade process so upgrades are much easier than with apps that have extensions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptability
More at Tiki model.
History of notable adaptations. This is to illustrate how Tiki adapted in last 10 years and to show that we can be confident for the next ten 😊
| Situation | What was done |
| 1.x code base was getting very messy | Development of mods. This was useful to remove cruft from code, and to deal with code of incompatible licenses, but ultimately added a lot of complexity, and slowed down the release process. This was a learning experience. |
| Release cycle became slow and unpredictable (before it was unpredictable but fast | Introduction of 6 month release cycle with LTS in Tiki2 |
| Hard to evolve trackers | Trackers Revamp in Tiki7 |
| Hard to get good & fast results for cross feature data | Unified Search |
| Hard to make very custom sites / UIs without making generic and re-contributing or hacking code | Framework features added / improved in Tiki 7 to 12 |
| Performance issues with large sites with a lot of trackers | elasticsearch in Tiki12 |
| Tiki is themable but there are no theme repositories | Bootstrap 3 in Tiki13 |
| Bootstrap 3 was great! Time for v4! | Bootstrap 4 in Tiki19 |
| We wanted a bit more time between releases | It was decided to move to an 8 month release cycle (instead of 6), still with an LTS every 3 version. |