Tiki is an application environment designed to be extensible and customizable, if you know PHP and want to extend Tiki this section will explain how to create new features for Tiki. The look of pages can be customized with Smarty and does not need PHP knowledge.

Basic rules

Let's start with some basic rules or guidelines:

Everybody is welcome to the Tiki developers community, if you need help ask if you want to try try, if you want us to review your work send it.

• All the logic and PHP code goes in the PHP file
  • A simple example of this is tiki-error.php. Using $smarty->assign allows you to pass variables to the Smarty template.
• All the presentation, displaying and layout goes to the template and in the CSS.
  • A simple example of this is templates/tiki-featured_link.tpl. Variables are displayed using {$variable}.
  • Using {$variable|escape} tells Smarty to manage any special HTML characters. escape is set by default to display HTML , but you can display other kind of data, htmlall, quote, hex, hexentities and also javascript (thanks tom). If a variable passed a '>' character, Smarty would convert it to a '>'. Check http://smarty.php.net/manual/en/language.modifier.escape.php for more information.
• The templates can then be overridden by styles.
  • If a file is found under templates/styles/your-theme/*.tpl it will override the default template file found under templates.
• All the strings are written to be easily translated using the tra() function in PHP or the {/tr} blocks in templates.
• All your HTML code must be XHTML 1.0 transitional compatible, use the W3C Validator to check your module before releasing it.
• Put styles to your XHTML code using CSS stylesheets.

• tikilib is the system library for tiki core modules.
• New module libraries should be created under lib or lib/modulename
• ADOdb is used in libraries and only in libraries to access the databases
• Direct DBMS functions such as MySQL API functions are not used.
• Please also see: DbAbstractionDev