Architecture / Installation

Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee 30 May 2005 04:50 GMT-0000 posts: 4661

> Thank you very much jsf2005! At least "customers" are working on problems 😂. I'm very much dissapointed with overall perfomance of tiki. Even to post here on these forums is a problem: It keeps losing replies. And if you want to joke about software - I've found "slow like tiki"...

Tiki is not a commercial product. It is the work of volunteers who are involved just because they enjoy working on and using Tiki. You should not expect the same experience as when you buy a product; then the maker has an obligation to satisfy you, as a buying customer. Tiki is a complex software product with thousands of lines of code — many, many manhours of work — and you and I and others are receiving it totally free of charge. Maybe the only "cost" is that we give useful feedback to help improve Tiki, or contribute in other ways if we can.

As for the "customers" working on problems here, it is important to understand the situation. When I was a Tiki newbie, I asked a lot of questions and more experienced people (other users as well as some developers taking time away from their coding) answered at least some of my questions. As I have gained experience with Tiki, I am now able to answer at least some questions posted by even newer people. This is how things work in an open-source collaborative project. People who want a company-customer relationship may want to look into commercial products instead, with their costs, benefits, guarantees, etc.

About these forums losing posts or whatever, keep in mind that this is a work in progress and is a test installation itself, so naturally there is a certain amount of bugs and other problems. Tiki page displays can be slow; this is being worked on, from what I hear, but naturally with so many things to check and so much data to present, Tiki will take longer than simpler web pages.

-- Gary

Posted by John Flagg 31 May 2005 15:47 GMT-0000 posts: 8

> Thank you very much jsf2005! At least "customers" are working on problems 😂. I'm very much dissapointed with overall perfomance of tiki. Even to post here on these forums is a problem: It keeps losing replies. And if you want to joke about software - I've found "slow like tiki"...

Gary, aris002 — We also got our Tikiwiki Online Help site back up and running. BTW, Gary, I wasn't complaining about the Open Source nature of Tikiwiki, which we were well aware of when we decided to go with it for Online Help. In fact, I've been extremely impressed by the sheer abundance of Tikiwiki features, functions, plugins, etc. This is the first serious bug I encountered in 3-4 months of working with Tikiwiki. I also got good support from Sylvie, who suggested basically the same procedure as you. We do have Tikiwiki installed on a Linux machine, so evidently the bug isn't just confined to Windows. (I'm guessing it's partly a matter of how you configure Tikiwiki.) Anyway, we'd already gone in and just deleted the phplayers menu from two tables, which also works. Below is a copy of Sylvie's email and my reply describing our workaround. Thanks,

--John

>This bug belongs to the feature phplayers that is an external library. (http://phplayersmenu.sourceforge.net/)
>Instead of deleting the menu, you could have desactivated the feature feature_phplayers in tiki_preferences
>To help you to debug this, I will need the menu. I suppose it is a specific configuration of the menu phplayers doesn't like. And I will need the description of the way you activate the phplayers on this menu.
>
>PS: there is a new version of phplayers (tiki is 3.1.1) perhaps it is worth to try it)
>

Hi again Sylvie — Just to follow up on this, we did find a workaround, and our Wiki Help system is now up and running again! What we did was simply delete the problem menu from the two MySQL tables where it appeared (tiki_menus and tiki_user_modules) and voila! Tikiwiki came back up again. I also understand from the forum (and your email) that setting feature_phplayers to "n" in tiki_preferences also works. Now that I can deactivate it with the interface too, I will. Just as a reference, I've included the two tables below as they appeared before the deletion. The menu that caused the problem and was deleted is the one named "Glossary." If someone hasn't done so already, I'll formally report this as a bug, including the possible workarounds. We're also installing a separate Test Tikiwiki and MySQL database, so I will experiment with this some more, now that I know what to watch out for. Many thanks for your help,

--John

mysql> select * from tiki_menus;

| menuId | name | description | type |

| 42 | Application menu | Main extensive navigation menu | d |
| 43 | Test Menu | test menu | d |
| 44 | Glossary | Links to Glossary items | d |

3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from tiki_user_modules;

| name | title | data |

| User Menu | User Menu | {menu id=43} |
| Glossary | Glossary | {phplayers id=44} |

2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee 30 May 2005 04:29 GMT-0000 posts: 4661

> Ok, my website is back to normal... You don't need to create a new instance of your MySQL. Just change one value: 'feature_phplayers'='n' (in a table 'tiki_preferences'). If I find more about it I'll tell you.

Did you turn on "PhpLayers Dynamic menus" on the Admin/Features page? This has the same effect as making the change directly in the tiki_preferences table, and can be done with the Tiki admin interface.

I use PhpLayers on my Tiki sites with no problems (http://www.cunningham-lee.com - Tiki 1.9.0 - and http://www.phinixi.com - 1.8.5); these run on Linux servers. The problems people are reporting regarding PhpLayers may be related to their server software and their own Tiki configurations. I also run a Tiki install on my Windows laptop for testing when I'm not online, and PhpLayers don't work, for example. I haven't posted a bug report so far because Windows support for Tiki is not an important issue for me. But I think anyone having problems with PhpLayers should report as much information about the server, etc. as possible.

-- Gary