History: UserPageedtandi

Background

I am experimenting with Tiki in a small software group within a larger organisation.
The group think the Tiki sofware is great stuff BTW

We use only a subset of the features that we consider the most important to our business.
In order of descending importance, we use:

1) Forums -Only just the most important feature. Facilitates knowlege sharing.
2) Wiki -A close second, will probably replace the Intranet site (a wiki is easier to maintain).
3) FAQs -Very useful. Duplicated effort in replying to queries is much reduced.
4) Blogs -Useful as a quick way of capturing and communicating one-off meeting minutes (replaces email).
5) Trackers -Will become useful once it becomes easier to use!

Here is a list of the issues we have with Tiki 1.7.1:

General

1) Tiki templates and URLs are full of the word 'Tiki'. In fact 'tiki' cannot be removed from the URLs because the pages are named this way. When it comes to presenting portals, it is undesirable to have the underlying product advertise itself. The portal should be presenting the name/brand of its owner.

2) Tiki performance is not great. The ionCube PHP Accelerator fails on certain operations running Tiki on Apache 2. It almost doubles the response time for pages and operations that work. I'd like to use it, if only it would work reliably.

3) The temp directory fills up with zero sized files. This requires manual maintenance periodically.

4) Trackers are hard to use. One of the biggest issue I have is that the text boxes do not format according to the wiki tags.

5) There is no printer friendly display of the tracker list. It is important to be able to print out a list of outstanding issues.

General Editing

6) General editing :- Is it not possible to insert smileys and other tags at the current cursor position? Update: This appears to be fixed in Tiki 1.8

7) General editing :- many of the entry and editing windows are too small, in particular Forums, Trackers and FAQs. Wiki and Blogs are OK.

8) The colour tag is difficult to use because there is no help regarding what the valid colours are.

Forums

9) On Forums, the 'forward to email address' feature does not use a template. Consequently, it is not possible to put a URL link into the mail message body. It is not possible to work around this using a special user that watches forum topics because of the sheer number of topics and additional topics are not automatically watched.

10) There should be an option to allow the creator of a topic to automatically be a watcher of that topic. Also, there should be an option to allow the contributor to a forum topic to automatically become the watcher of a topic.

11) It is not possible to embed images into Forum posts. A poor workaround is to use attachments.

12) Forum notification templates should have URLs in the default templates. Is it not obvious? How does one get the topic into the URL?

13) It would be good if there was some way of e-mailing new topics and topic entries to a forum. What happens is that an e-mail conversation starts off quite simply and innocently, but subsequently ballons into a monster issue. At some point, the conversation needs to be widened and recorded. Ideally one would like to create a new topic by forwarding the e-mail to a known address that creates a new topic. The conversation can then continue on the forum. It makes the use of Tiki forums more condusive.

14) The creator of forum topic does not have ithe capability to edit their own first forum post. They need to be assigned admin rights to do so!

FAQs

15) There is no printer friendly format for FAQs. Some answers can be quite big and people want to print individual answers. IE does a very bad job of printing FAQs.

16) There is no way of controlling the order that FAQs are displayed in. One would like to manually arrange the most frequently asked quistions toward the top.

17) There is no way of moving an FAQ question from one FAQ to another FAQ.

18) There is no preview facility when entering FAQs. The wiki tags work.

Blogs

19) Blogs do not have version history. Edits should be version controlled like wiki pages. It is currently possible to alter history.

20) Printing of large multi-page blogs does not work in mozilla 1.4. IE 5.5 is OK! Is there anything that can be done here?