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Ideas for integrating Artificial Intelligence into Tiki

See also Model Context Protocol MCP

📣 Hello everyone,


As artificial intelligence has been making waves lately, we thought it might be a good idea to consider integrating it into our beloved Tiki CMS.

⚠️ But let’s be careful—many talk about AI without really knowing or understanding what it is. Everyone’s talking about it, everyone wants to use it, but often without knowing how or without weighing the pros and cons.

So we can ask ourselves: which features in Tiki could be improved with AI? What could benefit from a boost or be highlighted using artificial intelligence?

If we take it a step further: Which features could we add to Tiki that truly leverage AI and showcase its capabilities?

Keep in mind that Tiki already uses some AI-powered features that work extremely well, such as the OCR plugin, use case in Tiki: Once enabled in your Tiki, the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature automatically processes the files in your file galleries by indexing their content. After indexing is complete, you can search for any word, and Tiki will tell you which file contains that word.

It’s from this perspective that we’d like to invite you to share your ideas:

  • Do you think integrating AI into our beloved Tiki CMS is a good idea?

  • If yes, where and how could we integrate it?

  • If not, please tell us about your past experiences with this type of integration.


Share your ideas by commenting on this page, we’d be happy to read them!

These are some possibilities maybe - brainstorming by :

Code assistant

Maybe this is already possible to some extent for PHP, JavaScript, etc. because PhpStorm has introduced an AI assistant for its IDEs.

People with more awareness of these areas know better than me but, apart from coding issues, maybe some maintenance challenges could be addressed like

  • CSS cleanup - check all CSS files and remove or comment-out any CSS that isn't referenced in the rest of the code (.tpls, etc.). Similarly find any CSS classes and id's in the .tpls, etc. that are missing a CSS rule (seems less likely but possible).
  • Language file cleanup - Make sure that active language files have up-to-date strings (currently referred to in .tpls, etc.) and have no obsolete strings.


These cleanups could be done with scripts or manually so it would just be a plus if an AI assistant could do them.

Challenge for Tiki: Probably AI assistants are strongest in well-documented software languages but may not be so helpful in more niche areas, like even with Smarty templates, where probably more guidance from the developer would be needed.

Documentation

AI chatbots can be very helpful but it seems the key is to have really good, comprehensive documentation for the chatbot to reference. In one experience trying to configure a server, the chatbot clearly had good Linux documentation to draw on, could suggest alternatives when things didn't work, could suggest tests to see what was happening, etc. That information has to be created first before the chatbot can be helpful in the conversation.

Challenge for Tiki: Tiki's documentation needs to be kept up to date, old information retired or clearly labeled, and so on to be useful in this context. This includes the end-user documentation at doc.tiki.org and themes.tiki.org, and the developer docs at dev.tiki.org.

Website page building

Many companies that are active one way or another in the website business these days advertise having an AI assistant to help create the customer's website. It seems maybe it's possible for the customer to input a prompt describing the layout of the page, maybe going through each section from top to bottom, and asking for this to be built and some (at least placeholder) text and images fetched and put in the page.

Challenge for Tiki: Tiki seems to be a few steps behind in this area because it doesn't have a "manual" drag and drop page builder like https://www.vvveb.com/vvvebjs/editor.html, or a even a library of blocks, like you can find for standard Bootstrap page elements, etc., to copy and paste by hand to create a Tiki page (examples: https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-bootstrap-blocks/, https://webpixels.io/. These probably need to be available first. Having an HTML-based library like this would be the basic level. Having a library of page elements made using wiki plugins, etc., would be a nice option where that is a priority. Anyway, before AI can help make Tiki's pages, probably some kind of component library like this is needed first.

Admin/editor assistance

Like an AI coding assistant but on the site admin/editor side, having real-time assistance for setting things up like displaying tracker information in wiki pages, using plugins in general, etc. would be great. This would be an aspect of page building or related to that, but the focus would be on specific content display and so on, such as interactive help using PluginList or other plugins, etc.

Then ongoing AI admin support might be accessed through the current admin preferences search but, to be worth converting, it should probably be expanded to also respond to questions like "How do I _ ?" Here it would access doc.tiki.org information, I imagine, so would also be an interactive alternative to the doc links on many admin page items.

Challenge for Tiki: Again, good comprehensive documentation needs to be available, then the integration of the AI so it's aware of what the user is doing, and the interface added for prompts, etc.

Initial site configuration

This could be thought of as the AI-assistant version of Tiki's configuration wizard screens, plus ongoing help in the context of the admin pages. The wizard screens that are displayed during a new site installation are pretty straightforward, so there would have to be some thinking about if having an AI assistant would be a worthwhile improvement (beyond the brand brag that Tiki has AI-supported site setup).

Challenge for Tiki: Probably this is a scenario that is prime for converting to AI-assisted because the process and outcome are tightly confined, with options along the way that maybe the chatbot can facilitate better than a list of checkboxes on a screen.

Agentic Workflow


A new "Agents" feature that allow the creation of custom agents automating workflow in Tiki. Each agent has:

  • A wiki page as its prompt
  • A user assigned to it (agentic users are flagged as such)
  • A set of tools to do things in Tiki
  • MCP commands to do things in other places


The agent execution would be triggered by an event, using the current event system. A initial reasonable subset of events would be chosen, and they would be available for user to use it to trigger an agent. More complex workflows could be generated by triggering new agent runs from events generated by an agent.

Challenge for Tiki: This requires a separate server running the agents, it can't run in a plain PHP web server as Tiki. And to align with Tiki's philosophy of hosting the whole content, it should be designed to be able to run using a local LLM.

Other ideas

  • Maybe too dystopian, but it might be interesting if these AI-related functions could be implemented and optionally via opt-in linked to the Tiki Connect feature or some new feedback mechanism that could keep track of problems users and admins are having, maybe even submit anonymized bug reports to dev.tiki.org.
  • There is a basic Activity Stream feature in Tiki. Could AI be used to produce more conversational content? Would this just be "AI slop" or could it serve a useful purpose? Could the action log information be output in a blog-like format that might be interesting?

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