Earthquakes

"Earthquakes" are events in Tiki code or community which "shake everything" and put us off course.

They tend to be problematic because they are big things that happen at a bad time (ex.:late in the dev cycle). Because we are tending to the aftermath of the earthquake, we are not doing a good job in the normal stabilization period of a release. And thus releases are less stable, prompting community members to stay on LTS versions, and it's a vicious cycle.

Past earthquakes:

• Tiki5 UTF-8
  • A last-minute fix ended up causing a lot of problems between 5.0 and 5.1
• Tiki7 Trackers revamp
  • It was so much work, started so late, that 7.x was released late and wasn't very stable
• Tiki9 Change in the behavior of HTML entities
  • This delayed the release of Tiki9 and caused all kinds of headaches

Moving to Smarty3 was a big job but since it was done early, it worked out well. So we must "plan" when we want to deal with major projects.

Potential future earthquakes

• Wiki Parser revamp
• Major redesign of templates/design (960.gs, etc)
• What else?

Related: SWOT