History: FLOSS Web Applications with the fastest release cycles
Preview of version: 7
Tiki is the Free and Open Source Software Web Application with the fastest release cycle
- FOSS -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software
- Web Application -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application (This includes Wiki, CMS, Groupwares or any application comparable to Tiki)
- fastest release cycle: If you want to upgrade quickly and get the latest and greatest features in an official release.
| When | Version number (click to see what's new in this version) |
| 2002-10 | 0.9 (first public release) |
| 2002-10 | Changelog 1.0 |
| 2002-11 | Changelog 1.1 |
| 2002-11 | Changelog 1.2 |
| 2002-12 | Changelog 1.3 |
| 2002-12 | Changelog 1.4 |
| 2003-02 | Changelog 1.5 |
| 2003-05 | Changelog 1.6 The printed version of the manual for 1.6 was 350 pages! |
| 2003-08 | Changelog 1.7 |
| 2004-02 | Changelog 1.8 |
| 2005-04 | Changelog 1.9 The printed version was at 960 pages, so we stopped the habit of printing it all 😊 |
| 2008-08 | 2.0 |
| 2009-05 | 3.0 |
| 2009-11 | 4.0 |
| 2010-06 | 5.0 |
| 2010-11 | 6.0 |
| 2011-06 | 7.0 |
| 2011-11 | 8.0 |
| 2012-06 | 9.0 |
| 2012-12 | 10.0 |
| 2013-07 | 11.0 |
| 2013-10 planned | 12.0 |
Thus, 22 releases in 11 years! and this doesn't count minor releases. The total of major and minor releases is approximately 100, which you can see at: All Releases
Some history: Tiki started out with an all-in-one model with a very rapid release cycle. Then, in late 2004, a mods system (An extensions system which is common in web apps) was introduced for branch 1.9. While this had some benefits, it also added a lot of complexity (versioning of mods, making sure mods are in sync with main code base, etc), and this was a contributing factor to the 3 year delay between 1.9 and 2.0. In 2008, at TikiFestStrasbourg, community members decided to move to a rapid and predictable release cycle, with Long Term Support (LTS) versions.
About extensions (aka plugins)
More recently than Tiki, Typo3 and Joomla! have moved to a 6-month release cycle, but in all these cases, with their extension-based model, not all features are ready at the same time. And too often, extensions are never ported to the next version. Thanks to the Tiki model, (http://tiki.org/Model) we have inherent synchronized releases and easy upgrades.
WordPress
To be fair, WordPress has the approximate same overall release cycle -> 20 releases in 10 years, and 10 releases in last 5 years, and thus 2 releases per year throughout the life of the project and you still need to wait for your extensions to be updated. Depending on which exact date you look at and which extensions you use, Tiki is a bit faster, or WordPress is a bit faster. But globally, it's a tie and thus, Tiki and WordPress share the title of "Free and Open Source Software Web Application with the fastest release cycle" 😊 To see real differences between the projects, please see: Tiki vs WordPress.
See also: Version Lifecycle