Packt Publishing is now accepting nominations for its 2010 Open source Awards. The Tiki Community needs your help to nominate Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware!

By nominating Tiki, you'll also be automatically entered into a prize draw for an Amazon Kindle from Packt Publishing. Nominations end September 17.

See http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home for more information.

Did you know that two very exciting Open Source software products for web conferencing, online social collaboration/media have strong roots in Ottawa? On Wednesday August 18th at 6PM, web development companies, systems integrators, designers, developers and open source enthusiasts will be gathering at The Code Factory in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada for a wine and cheese networking event.

You are invited to come learn how Tiki and BigBlueButton are leading the way in the online world of Collaboration and Communication and meet some of the developers and companies that work with these great products.

The Tiki Community Software Association is proud to announce the 5.1 release of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. This latest release includes many fixes, tweaks, and updates, including several new and improved features:

• Improved compatibility for Microsoft Windows and IIS
• Fixed the Since Last Visit module
• Better support for UTF-8

Review the Tiki 5.1 Release Notes (http://tikiwiki.org/ReleaseNotes5.1) and change log for complete information.

More than a dozen members of the Tiki Community have contributed over 140 updates to this release. All Tiki admins are encouraged to upgrade their sites to this latest release. See http://info.tikiwiki.org/Download for information on how to download this release.

Tiki 6 on the Horizon
Meanwhile, Tiki developers are hard at work on Tiki 6: the next generation of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. The Tiki Community made great strides forward during the recent TikiFest in Barcelona. Early adopters can obtain the pre-release Tiki 6 from http://info.tikiwiki.org/Download for testing or to explore the new features in Tiki 6.

For details on Tiki 6, planned for release in October 2010, see http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tiki6. Tiki 6 will succeed Tiki 3 as the Long Term Support (LTS) version.

The Tiki Community Software Association is proud to announce the 5.1 RC1 (release candidate) release of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. This latest release includes many fixes, tweaks, and updates.

Review the Tiki 5.1 Release Notes (http://tikiwiki.org/ReleaseNotes5.1) and change log for complete information.

Early adoptors can obtain this release candidate from Sourceforge.net (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tikiwiki/files/) and are encouraged to report feedback and issues to the Tiki Community at: http://dev.tikiwiki.org.

The most recent TikiFest recently ended in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) on July 18. At this TikiFest, the second in Barcelona, more than 20 Tiki developers, consultants, and end-users met (including others via video conference) to work to improve and upgrade Tiki features, as well as to discuss the future of Tiki development.

Led by long-time Tiki Community members (including some board members of the Tiki Software Community Association) Marc (marclaporte), Louis-Philippe (lph), Jean-Marc (jyhem), Jonny (jonnyb) and Xavi (xavi), great progress was made for the next major Tiki release. Tiki 6, planned for October 2010), will include many of the items discussed and coded during this TikiFest, such as:

• Payment system using "CCLite" (a free software web application to support Community Currency management within and among barter networks)
• Fixing encoding issues (when upgrading Tiki under certain specific scenarios)
• Cron-like features (such as automatically changing tracker item status and sending email users if their tracker items do change within a specific amount of time. This is especially useful for Barter networks and Bug Trackers.
• Identifying ways (through the Newsletters and Group Watches featurse) to allow Tiki site administrators to easily distribute content to users, while allowing the users an option to unsubscribe
• New profile "Easy Blog" to easily install common blogging features (such as blog archives, image headers, etc.) for Tiki sites (http://profiles.tikiwiki.org/Easy+Blog )

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the release of its first promotional video: How to get help.

In this video, recorded in March 2010, Gary Cunningham-Lee explains how new Tiki Community members can get help with their Tiki sites. Gary is a long-time Tiki contributor and a member of the Tiki Software Community Association.

Watch the complete video at: http://tv.tiki.org/tiki-kaltura_video.php?mixId=0_u4e00k7x.

A series of video clips, released under a Creative Commons license, will be made available for interested parties. Daniel Gauthier, a member of the Tiki Community and the filmmaker of these clips says, "I've created these video clips for a very specific purpose: To help developers, technology decision makers and companies like ISPs who normally know about Open Source Development projects understand the richness of the Tiki Community."

If you are a Tiki user, administrator, or developer in Florida, USA, then you are invited to connect with your fellow Tiki-ers and help form the Florida Tiki User Group.

Recently a group of active Tiki Community Members, including Kimberly Fink (aka kimberlyf) and Ben Eason met to begin organizing a local users group for Tiki advocates in Florida. The group plans to meet periodically (both in-person and virtually), to share their experiences, learn how to improve their Tiki sites, and maybe even organize some TikiFests.

To learn more about the group, including how to start your own local Tiki user group, contact Kimberly Fink or visit http://tikiwiki.org/FloridaTikiUserGroup.

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is proud to announce its sponsorship of Recent Changes Camp 2010: Montréal to be held June 25-26-27 in Montréal, Canada. The event is a chance for everyone in the wiki community to meet and have a fun, productive conversation about our passion for wikis of all stripes.

Several members of the Tiki Community, including Marc Laporte, Nelson Ko, Louis-Philippe Huberdeau, Renoir Boulanger, Tanea Castro Durand and Daniel Gauthier, will be in attendance. For more information about RoCoCo 2010, see http://rococo2010.org.

Hot on the heels of Tiki 5.0, the Tiki community is proud to announce the releases of Tiki 4.3 and 3.6 LTS. Both versions included primarily fixes and patches. Users of Tiki 4.x and 3.x are encouraged to upgrade to this new release

The latest generation of Tiki is now available. This version, release 5.0, includes 3129 code contributions by more than 40 members of the Tiki community and features lots of new and improved functionality, including:

• Shopping cart, group subscriptions and payments
• Workspaces & perspectives: for efficient partitioning of large projects, with permission based dynamic content & preference filtering
• BigBlueButton web-conferencing integration (audio/video/chat/screensharing)
• WebDAV access to file galleries
• Performance improvements
• Advanced rating and scoring system,
• Improved translation/multilingual support - i18n
• Spreadsheets, using jQuery
• New themes (skins)
• and much more more

For complete information about this new release, see http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tiki5.

Tiki Branding Initiative

The Tiki 5.0 release also introduces a new Tiki branding strategy. The official name of the project changes from TikiWiki CMS/Groupware to Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. Additionally, a new logo is being introduced to help unify the project's vision, mission, and values. All Tiki community members are encouraged to help grow the Tiki brand. For complete information, see http://branding.tikiwiki.org.

Tiki Community Calendar The Tiki Community calendar is now online at http://tikiwiki.org. This calendar lists upcoming events with presentations about Tiki, given by Tiki community members. The calendar also lists the upcoming TikiFests -- community-driven events -- in Montreal, Barcelona, New York City, Ottawa, and more. For complete information on TikiFests, see http://tikiwiki.org/tikifest.