Hello everybody,

I am currently building a Tiki site and experiencing the basic user obstacles. You can see the work in progress at TheTransitioner.

I want to tell the developper community how impressed I am about this fantastic project. It's visionnary, its clean, professionnal and it wears a lot of faith in it. Such a project gives faith in what Human is able to accomplish when there is no boss, dictator or other kind of centralized power. The real power is in everyone's hands, Tikiwiki and many other great applications are the proof of it.

So, a big Thanks to everyone!!!😀

My goal now is when we can move from a Knowledge Ecology up to a real Knowledge Economy (this is what TheTransitioner is about).

Below is a list of bugs I found along the way (still using the 1.7.5) and suggestions.

Bugs

Forums

Impossible to generate and use forums. The forum option has been checked, but still, the forum page shows an empty popup list with no forum titles in it. The forum admin doesn't provide any link or button to create a new forum. This bug happens as admin or simple visitor, no difference.

Wikiwords

• Single quote not accepted in wiki names. Ex: Coup d'Etat cannot be a wiki link. Too bad since many French names have a single quote between the article and the name.
• Wiki words not accepted in titles (! !! !!! etc)
• Wiki words don't work when touching a . , ; : etc. They have to be put between parenthesis
• When using 2 tikiwikis simultaneously, the system gets confused in the user recognition
• Sometimes urls with separate words, rather than appearing with '+' between each words, appear with a coded space %20. Such urls are not as easy to read as the ones with the '+' between words...

Misc.

• Algeria is missing in the list of countries
• When the edit/modify categories is made available to registered users, a second 'Category' link appears in the main menu. The 1st 'categories' link only displays the categories, the 2nd 'Categories' (with a capital C) displays them and let the user edit them. Not a big issue but confusing.
• Boxes shouldn't generate a line jump after them

Some ideas for later versions...

• Wysiwyg text editor: we want easy editing? A wysiwyg text editor would make the job even easier for new comers. Who cares about knowing what the tags are as long as you get what you want? The main difference is that this editor would handle tiki words (you still continue to write them between 2 parenthesis) and it would show in realtime if the linked page aready exists or not (then add the ? at the end of the word). My gut feeling is that it's not that difficult to make considering what's already there.

• Provide a visual sign for external hyperlinks to distinguish them from internal wiki ones (most wikis provide this feature).

• After the user has created an account with login+password, he gets sent back to the same "create login+pass" page rather than being sent to the homepage. He should be sent to the homepage.

• It would be nice if the admin could configure an automated welcome message. This would be useful to send general guidelines that the new comer could keep to help him with the site navigation.

• The 'Remember me' feature might be confusing because the user may believe that next time he comes to the site his login + password arepre-entered and he just has to clic on Enter (this is the current way in the windows environment I guess). What about "Keep me logged in when I come back"?

• Option Count Admin page views : it would be useful to extend the concept of 'admin' to all users having admin rights, and not just the admin account. The reason is that building a whole site as 'admin' is not a very sexy signature to leave when we create new articles. The admin would rather create another admin login with his own name but he doesn't want to be counted in the statistics.

• The admin menu is a sort of long list in which words put into an alphabetical order would help the reading. It is not a big issue but...

• Have a section to configure and edit emails notification. The 'Email Notification' feature just let the admin link an event to an email sender. How can he configure the object and the content?

• The format 'UserPage'+login name is imposed. Why not let the admin decide the format and the user decide the final name? In many wikis it is useful to let the user decide what his personal wikipage is so that he can sign with them. If you have a long name, signing with UserPageMichaelJackson is not very sexy. Signing MichaelJackson is much more sexy, but right now it cannot be connected to the userprofile page...

• An easy-to-use Trackback feature just like in Movable Type

• A list of wikiwords for which a page has not been created would be very usefull

• Sandbox keeps the same name in other languages and it's meaningless. Might be good to have the ability for the admin to rename it.

• Tables They might become much easier to build with a dedicated begin/end markup tag. Right now they are difficult to visualize in edit mode because the 'begin table' tag and the 'next line' tags are the same: ||.

As a consequence, a table has to be built like this:
||L1C1|L1C2||L2C1|L2C2|| where different table lines have to appear in one same line in edit mode.

Let's decide for instance that the begin/end table tags are << and >>. Then we can write any table in a more "wysiwyg way" when in edit mode:
<<L1C1|L1C2
L2C1|L2C2>>
etc...~/np~

• Wiki links: when we generate a new wiki link, the '?' is stuck to the last word of the whole link to say that this wiki link is waiting for it's related page to be edited. It means that the reader cannot figure out what is the set of words that concern the wiki link, and this can be confusing. For instance: Dark side of the Moon has the question mark right after Moon. How does the reader know whether the wiki link to make is about the moon or the dark side of the moon? A solution might be to give a color to the whole set of linked words. It would appear like this: Dark Side of the Moon

• Private pages with limited rights to specific groups should not be listed for everyone in the 'Last changes' list. It should only appear for those who have the rights to see it.

• Offline editor: having an offline wiki editor would be useful for 2 reasons:

1. Because you can work offline (this is a pretty good reason uh 😊
2. Because you can edit and save texts that you still don't want to see online (you can save it at an intermediary stage when you have to go eating or to the bathroom or to a meeting 😊

It would be even more fantastic if this offline editor could send the content online by whatever means.

• Indent: Tikiwiki doesn't seem to provide tags to indent text. This would be a usefull feature, specially when quoting. I guess this will be provided in the 1.8 version.

• email: I don't know how realistic this is, but when using my POP email, I found myself making Tikiwords when writing a mail and thought a plugin to a pop email might be interesting. Then the user can insert wiki words in his email, and these wiki words will be transformed as full url links to a predefined wiki.

• Chat: might be nice if we could invite someone online for a chat. Right now all participants need to be in the Chat area in order to communicate, there is no feature to invite them to go there while they are somewhere else in the site. It might be interesting if the chat feature was made in a popup window so that you can keep working in Tiki in parallel.

• Rerooting: many times there are pages that are transfered to another page, or pages that can have multiple names. It would be useful to have an instruction that, when inserted in a page, would automatically send to another page.

Self-inclusion

This is a whole topic by itself. The "self-inclusion" feature is one of the powerful aspects of many wikis. The fact that the last modified pages, or the orphan pages, or the "blank" pages, or the less visited pages, or the pages belonging to a specific category, or the pages written by JohnDoe are listed in an easy to read wiki text format — and not a cold computer listing — allows interesting, interactive and engaging content about dynamics the wiki.

In general, any collective intelligence tool needs a feedback loop that enhances a permanent back & forth signal between level n (participants) and n+1 (the team). The design of these tools is not just to be seen as an information, but as a cool&fun thing that generates strong dynamics and the magic of complex systems.

Maybe this is an area in which I can help later for Tiki (such things will be clearly formulated in TheTransitioner once it's a little more developed).