Happy Birthday, Tiki!


Today is the 20th birthday of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. Congratulations to all the people behind this success including contributors, community members, donors, critics, and users.

From humble beginnings as a wiki with extras in 2002 to a web application that is used to create all kinds of websites, portals, knowledge bases, intranets, apps, and extranets 20 years later, Tiki has come a long way.

"Making software the wiki way", with nearly 56,625 commits by 395 contributors, it has, cumulatively, one of the largest Open Source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams tracked by Open Hub.

We want to use this opportunity to thank all the people who have made this success possible. People indeed are our most valuable asset. For this feature I have asked Adrien Maloba, a talented new contributor to the community, about the present and future of Tiki.


Habiba: Tell us a little about your background and how you became involved with Tiki? How’s your experience so far with the Tiki and its community?

Adrien: I started working on Tiki in 2019, it's been more than three years that I've been collaborating with the Tiki community. In the beginning, I got to know how Tiki works by working on simple data management projects, interacting with wiki pages, files, other basic features, and especially Trackers. One of the first projects I worked on was to help implement a media library.

Later, I started to study the structure of the Tiki code because I was given a development-related task. I needed support and guidance to be able to contribute to the improvement and evolution of Tiki.

Today, I have already gained some experience that allows me to easily understand the code and reduce the time needed to contribute or improve features. Tiki is a big project; both on the interface side and in the code, there are always new discoveries to make. The community is responsive and helps to address needs that may arise. The community plays an important role in the growth of Tiki and I think it's reasonable that some initiatives are brought to the community before they are implemented so that the community can give its opinion.

H: What do you think are the core strengths of Tiki and why?

A: Tiki's main strengths are the fact that it is licensed as a free and Open Source application, and that it is written in PHP, which is one of the most widely used languages on the web today. The other feature of Tiki's strength is its "all-in-one" nature, meaning that it is largely self-contained and doesn’t require external plugins for its proper functioning. Tiki's strength is also due to the constant activity of its community, which continues to contribute to its growth.


H: There are many Open Source projects in the market today — what separates Tiki from the rest?

A: Unlike many projects, Tiki contains all functionality in its code base. For it to work, no external plugins are needed. I think this is a big point of difference between Tiki and other projects.

H: Can you shed some light on Tiki’s future development initiatives? What is Tiki going to be in five years?

A: I couldn't say what exactly Tiki will be like in the next five years, but based on its evolution, initiatives and contributions from the community; I can see that Tiki is progressing in line with current technology. One such example is the integration of RubixML in Tiki which provides 40+ supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms and other possibilities that were not present in Tiki in the processing of information.

Its continuous improvement for end user like Interledger Protocol (ILP) for sending payments across different ledgers, Smartmenus and linking emails directly to respective tracker are setting new industry standards.

It's a project that evolves and has all the elements to lead way for the next 20 years of technological advancements.

H: And a final question, can you share some fact/figure if you have readily available. Like how many contributions to Tiki, migrations, bugs/security issues resolved etc.

A: I have been involved in integrating many features, fixing bugs, writing documentations etc., directly and indirectly. There are over 60 merge requests that I have initiated, including open, merged, and closed requests.

H: Thank you for your time. We wish you and Tiki a prosperous decade ahead.