Is Tiki dead or alive?
That might seem like a stupid question here on this forum. But if you have been seeing things the way I have lately, it would be a very serious question.
I have been looking to convert my political web site into a community site. And after a god-awful amount of time and research, Tiki was chosen as one of 4 systems to be tested, to find one to base my site on. The other three are Drupal, BitWeaver, and WebApp.
I cant say I am very happy with any of them, including Tiki.
I wont bother going into the problems I have with the other programs, since they dont belong here. But I will say what I think about Tiki. For my purposses, Tiki fits the bill. It does have all the features I need, and it is fairly easy to use. The last is important to me, as I am a user, not a programmer. But it, like the others, has some serious issues as well.
The first I ran into, was a lack of decent skins, or whatever Tiki chooses to call them. That is annoying, but otherwise minor. And, to be fair, sucky or not, it comes with more skins than any other program I have looked at.
The second, would be a complete deal-breaker, if any other program had all the features and ease of use I need. Tiki, even here, has a very bad habit of logging me off while reading or composing posts. I have already lost several hours of writing because of this. I can use any other site or forum, and never have that problem, so it is unique to Tiki. I posted about it on another heading, and the problem, as well as many other posted problems from other users, were completely ignored. That is a very bad sign right there. Whether or not you can help with a problem is not the issue. The issue is in ignoring those who have problems. That shows a lack of respect for those using your program. Whether its a true lack of respect, or just an apparent lack of respect hardly matters to those being ignored. I'm sure many have already gone someplace else where they will not be ignored.
Even that problem I could work around, if need be. When I choose to be, I can be a royal pain where the sun doesnt shine, and can be very effective at getting attention.
But then comes the most serious problem, and one that cannot be gotten around. Is Tiki alive or dead? Outside of this forum, I have seen no sign of life at all from Tiki, since last October. So this project, if not dead, sure seems to have been in a coma for half a year now. Combine that with the fact that version 1.9.4, the version I am testing, has known security issues, with no known patches or updates available, according to the security sites I checked with. I came here and found there is a newer version, but found no info about that security issue (Cross-site scripting.). But even if that issue has been fixed, no new activity in six months is a very bad sign. If I were to install Tiki as my CMS, how can I be sure it will not be abandoned tomorrow, and be a target for every hacker and script-kiddy the day after that? Whether it has what I need or not, it would be pointless to use a program thats a dead fish. (You may be interested to know that BitWeaver, a derivative of Tiki, seems to have been dead even longer. Nothing from them since last September.)
So while my question might seem stupid here on this board, it is not so stupid from where I sit.
I expect the knee-jerk answer to be "No, we are not dead.". But if this project is not dead, then it needs some very serious face-lifting and PR work done on it. Because as things stand, anyone doing a cursory check on this software would conclude that the project is dead, and look for something more active. And anyone like me, a user instead of a developer or programmer, would head for Drupal or WebApp instead. Compared to Tiki, those are poor second choices. Drupal is aimed at developers, not users; and while WebAbb is aimed at users, it doesnt yet have features to compete with Tiki. To be brutally honest, if WebApp did have the features, I would not be here writing this, I would already be using WebApp.
Should be interesting to see what, if any, reaction I get from this.