History: UserPagejamesoftopiya

Who I am

Now before we get into my Tikiwiki experience let me tell you about me.

First off I have NEVER been part of a web community of this nature, so please excuse any signs of my foot going in my mouth!

I am a,

• Music maker, I play a midi horn as my favorite, but what ever else happens to be at hand (Guitar, Piano, Recorder) is OK.
• Spirit Healer, Most of my work has been spirit driven, as it is with tikiwiki. My main interests are related to how we view the world rather then how we may gain. My main direction as far as my work as Webkeeper is to share these ideas.
• Adventuring Friend, As an Adventuring Friend I hope that I am there. I have taken many on trips they thought they would not take. They (hopefully) have felt safe. (as hopfully my clients do with my tikiwiki adventure)
• Life long advocate of our Mother Earth and her preservation.
• Webkeeper that hardly surfs and learns web work on a need to know basis.

At this time I have a connection to Tikiwiki for a number of reasons.

• As a Web Host, I am currently serving several clients tikiwiki sites.
• As a Webkeeper I have several Tikiwiki sites myself.
• As a Web Community builder I am currently working to amalgamate a bunch of assorted web-enterprise into a community of communities. This involves about a dozen TW sites.

TikiFest-Song

There are several reasons that I am here at Tikiwiki.org.

• I must learn about Tikiwiki so that I may better serve my clients.
• I need to explore the greater potentials of Tikiwiki so that I may offer more as a Web designer.
• I would like to return to the Tikiwiki community as this is an important part of the Open source directive.

So basically I am here on a Tikiwiki 101 course. In the next few months I have a huge list of things that I must learn. I am learning most of this from the ground up so a little of every thing is on my agenda. I will be digging through the wiki and forums for info. I will be asking questions. I will try to answer yours.

If I see a question that may be important to my clients I will work on an answer. So if you get a response from me and it seems that I have put a lot of thought into it you may be right. Part of this is that I like to help, but also that I must be able to answer these questions my self. If you need help trying to understand something just ask. I may not know but will try to point you in the right direction.

There a only a few ways that I think I can really help around here.

• Currently I have been helping to answer some of the (easy) questions in the support forums.
• By actively looking for and reporting bugs. (really I will!)
• I would like to offer one of my partners help in French to English translations.
• I would like to help in getting the docs.tikiwiki.org site filled up.
• I intend to offer the mods and styles that I create to the community.
• By offering space for testing features etc, see below
• I will also be encouraging an "End User" friendly area

As I said above I believe it is important to return to the community. As a Webkeeper/Host I encourage my clients to contribute to the Open source projects that they use. A portion of our revenue is redirected back to the developers of the Open source projects that I encourage. However, as Tikiwiki is such a huge part of what we are doing it seems more then that is required.

We have some test sites that we allow those interested in tikiwiki or devs to play with and test out. We currently have three that are available. We have a 1.7.6 , 1.81 and a 1.9 CVS HEAD. If you would like to have access to these feel free to message me! At this time we will allow Tikiwiki.org members to use this. Hey devs, if this is of interest let me know.

I have a few areas that I am working on with tikiwiki. Although these projects are directly related to my web design/hosting needs I hope that these contributions will also help the tikiwiki community as well.

• Modding the themes to create a series of colour choices from each base theme. (Like the xxxmetal series)
• Creating a series of trackers that could be included in a base set up of tikiwiki. Examples; guest book, help-desk, resource directory, and so on.
• Creating modified templates that will be added to modified themes so that the look will be the same but in some areas features will be added or missing. This would use the theme per section/page/cat...
• And other fun stuff

This is a fun little project!

I am working to create a tikiwiki package that I can install for clients that is much more ready to go then tikiwiki is as a standard issue. No mater how you slice it tikiwiki is not all that novice friendly. Most other CMS choices are installed and a few clicks later you have a working site. And these often include friendly hellos and how too's in the new site.

It is a lot nicer to be greeted to a "Hello and welcome to your new install of tikiwiki. Please use the edit button above to change this page" Rather then "Error you do not have permission to view this page". Boy, talk about making it seem like you goofed up before you even start! What has been done with the “Tikiwiki Assistant� is a very good start.

Now I really do not know the "Proper" way to do this but here is my idea.
I am setting up a site that would include the trackers made in the above note as well as other set up procedures.
So...

• Start with the basic enabled setup (Or something similar)
• Create generic trackers, IE; guest book, help desk etc
• Set up a "Home" blog, wiki, forum and articles area with a welcome to our site introduction. And a little info on using each area with links to the doc.tikiwiki.org site.
• Create generic main menus going to the "home" areas. IE; blogs, Articles, forum, wiki ...
• Set up a few basic generic content templates. Each with a "Add your text here" or "your picture here" description.
• Set up a "Web master" user that has admin privileges so the user will be less likely to use the admin profile for site work.
• Create a tiki_top_bar that has a place for the user logo with a predetermined link.
• And so on, perhaps making both a personal and a biz setup as well.

Now after this site is created I will save it and the data base. When a client wants a tikiwiki install I will just upload it and say Have fun! (Or perhaps I will include this in an auto install. (sorry to Fantistico but the less questions that I get about setting up a site the more time I have for other things)
Now this will work just fine for me but I have not a clue how I would get this as something that other tikiwiki users could use. I do not have the required skills to create the data base installer or any of the rest of that stuff. I assume that as most of these changes are database related that it would be easy to make an additional choice in the installation procedure.

I will explore the site here to see if there is work going on in this regard!

And that all for now folks!