Presentation

Hi, I'm Philippe Cloutier, nickname chealer (IRC, SourceForge) or Chealer9 here and I am also known as Tikiwiki mascot due to the time I use to spend on it versus my coding skills. I weight about 67 kg and measure about 178 cm. I am known to be randomly serious, sometimes doing such things as mentioning useless informations as my weight and height on my UserPage.

Me and Tikiwiki

What

How I can help

• I mainly answer support requests and act as "informational node".
• I often write and review documentation. More generally I'm an important maintainer of tikiwiki.org
• I organize bug and patch trackers at SourceForge. Almost daily I check new bugs, test them (when I can, maybe 3/4 of them), make sure the trackers are accurate. Sometimes, I try to fix bugs. Rarely, I commit a fix😛
• Rarely I fix some mistakes in the francophone translation.

Overall, I'm useful because I know a lot about Tikiwiki, its documentation and its community. I am among the best persons to answer questions such as "is there documentation about this, does somebody else have this bug, what should I do if I found this about Tiki, can Tiki do this, is there someone working on this already?". I can also find you a way to help Tiki if you can't by yourself😁

Why

I began to use Tiki as admin for a group speaking idolinguo...and I liked it 😀
I have basic programming skills, not enough to feel like coding new stuff anytime soon.
However I like must like Open Source Software and I always liked to know how to code. I eventually decided to learn PHP in a very loose way so I can now contribute fixes at times. Therefore you can still see me trying to fix something introducing a new line without a ";" at the end🙄 Hopefully, I use to test my changes before I commit them❗
Participating in Tiki also learns me plenty of English (although I'm not sure I really want to learn that😕).

My favorite RFEs😛

Text Callouts: business and education uses

Notes

Below this, content of this page is not guaranteed to be pertinent. Read at the risk of spending your time... or who knows, having to put yourself in a drunk mind to understand🙀

About Open Source development

I am not so much of an open source developer. Let's talk about my limited and possibly partially wrong understanding of Tiki's development, at least.
The people that take part in Tiki's development are very rarely paid to contribute something. They do it, sometimes because it's cool, otherwise because they're part of a "meritocracy" (I'm using this term because someone else told Tiki was one😛). If you're new to Open Source, there are a few misconceptions you might have (if you're like me and many others...). Nobody here is a Tiki fanatic ready to help you or work about anything. Tiki is a monster applications with features from Wiki to chat and games. I personally have no interest in debugging games (if they have bugs...I have no idea 😛 ). However, generally people still collaborate at times even if they won't directly get something in return. This is because of the meritocracy part. So, let's come to the tip.

Questions

If you want to ask a question, try not doing it from person to person.
There are a few ways to get help.

• IRC channel #tikiwiki
• tikiwiki.org forums Tiki Features/Usability or Architecture/Installation
• SourceForge Help forum
• Private messages to other persons

If you have a simple question, you might want to keep yourself from disturbing others posting in the tw.o forums by sending a private message to somebody (like me). Try avoiding that. This will generally take more time, you'll have to reask your question if the person doesn't know, and if you get an answer, it won't be recorded (it could be useful to others). The other thing you may not think is that the person who answers won't get as much credit if it answers personally than if others see that it answered on the forums or on IRC. By questioning in public you help maintain the meritocracy. So first, if you have an easy question, ask on IRC. If it's a complicated one or you don't get an answer on IRC, try the forums. Eventually, if it's important, try the developers' mailing list. Only when you know only few persons will be able to answer think about using private messages.

WikiBlog of experience with Tiki

This is a short version of what could be a blog about my experience with Tiki.
I learned an artificial language meant to be an auxiliary language during January 2002. I first read about GNU and Free Software during March 2003. I "went Open Source" rather fast, among other things discovering SourceForge. I learned about Wikis during the summer. I learned about Tikiwiki checking the Top Activity projects while Tiki was the project of the month (July 2003). I must have checked the website, found that it was cool to have a Wiki. And then I realized I could use Tiki for making a website about Ido. I didn't know what was a CMS at this time, and my knowledge about others is still limited to talks I heard. I must have liked Tiki 😊. I started fixing about 10 typos on the website😂
Then I noticed there was a duplicate bug tracker (what was I doing there?🙄)and noticed Marc Laporte about it. He rapidly made me a Tiki developer, at my greatest surprise. It must have motivated me, and I started to test other bug trackers on my own site and reporting if it worked for me. I became a bug trackers organizer while I was still learning Tiki and exploring tikiwiki.org. Eventually I discovered the IRC channel and the fun started. I learned more about the community, found it cool to "participate to Open Source" while learning about it. I started helping with documentation. I rapidly focused on helping people with problems (c. e. bugs and new people learning how to do some stuff). I learned how to use CVS when I suceeded to fix a very easy bug (I added a quote) 😂 All that was enough to make me spend several hours each day at Tiki and bring me a good knowledge of things around Tiki, so mose proposed me to be release 1.7.3 coordinator. I rather failed this because I didn't have UNIX. But I was already decided to switch from Windows to Linux. I did that during November/December. During November I also learned Smarty, basic PHP, basic SQL and started looking at how Tiki code was done beyond templates to be able to read most code and do the easy fixes. Since, I can apply some patches proposed and more rarely fix myself. During December I attended in my own town a conference about CMS-s to see Marc Laporte present Tiki. This was the occasion to meet a fellow Tiki user for the first time.
Since this time, I don't have to learn much more, I'm already pretty busy😊 During March I went to Montreal to join Marc Laporte and mose for the first weekend of TikiFest. It was pretty cool even if I wasn't very energetic and it took a long time to find usable hard drives🙄 I used the opportunity to ask mose a few questions about PHP, Tiki and Linux that were harder to "Google". I wished I didn't have to leave so quickly😕

That's it for now. In a few monthes when I feel like updating this page you'll know more. Meanwhile, don't worry, I live in a safe place, you can always ask me how I'm feeling on IRC.

ChealiCore

ClealiCore is the next generation TikiWiki. It will be the GirlsCore running on CE_PHP, which is a not yet written improvement of PHP that I'll write after I learn and become a C guru providing Smarty as a PHP extension to speed up GirlsCore.

...page... Wiki page pagination has not been enabled.

How I stopped implication as Tikiwiki developer

When I was learning Tiki, I remember noticing Marc Laporte about a bug to close in SourceForge bug trackers, and thus being "promoted" to developer immediately. I was very surprised and mentioned to him that I already lacked time so I would be unable to help much. Yet a few days later I started spending several hours a day on the project. I would soon start to worry "Didn't I say I was already lacking time?". And I was right...

Since I lacked skills to help the project the most important help I could provide was "informational node". This means I was reading (and generally reviewing) about anything about Tiki, so that I was aware of every development plan, bug, community member, etc. Particularly now, there's a lot about Tiki, so I used to spend about 2 hours each day doing just that. As I learned to code (just a bit 🙄) I started to try to fix bugs, and learn more too, so it became much more time...I really looked like a mascot😉 I would say I spent about 1500 hours playing/working around Tiki. I started my implication about 9 months ago and liked it until the end. However, I have come to realize the time I spent on this project to be a major problem for me several times already, and gradually came to regret participating in Tiki when AFK. Previous 5 months were poor for my development more than any I can remember. When you like something while doing it and hate it the rest of the time it means it has become an addiction. It's the second time in my life I decide to brutally quit an addiction, so I must say I feel like I failed something.

In summary, time (life?) goes too fast and I simply don't wish to continue development without any professional relation to the project until damian finds how to get more hours in a day😂

I joined the project during the more or less stable period before DB abstraction was done hoping to improve documentation mainly. Tiki since became a truly successful project and I leave without fear for it. I know I'll be letting a few things I was "responsible" for opened and am willing to answer personal requests for information about stuff I have messed with without problems. I am not leaving due to tensions with other community members, it was a pleasure to work with you (and meet the geek culture more closely😊).

Particular thanks to mose for his implication in this project. A few others like Luis Argerich, Florian Gleixner, Sylvie Greverend, Oliver Hertel, Marc Laporte and Damian Parker probably also deserve a mention😁

Best wishes to the Tiki community