The Tiki Project

Full sail since 2002

A wiki page at the then-new tikiwiki.org website, symbolized by the Kon-Tiki raft of Thor Hyerdahl's trans-Pacific expedition, outlined the mission and goals of the new software project:

  • To be a powerful, leading, complete, user-friendly, stable and secure full-featured open source web application, which includes (but is not limited to) cms & groupware features
  • To have a fun & friendly community where people can easily contribute to & enhance Tiki
  • World domination

The same article also laid out goals for the new project:

  • To find delicate balance/get best of both worlds to make Tiki features as good or better than standalone applications
    • Feature richness and rapid development
    • Stability, extensive testing and up-to-date documentation
  • Keep track of development activity by using a total logging and a systematic publishing.
  • Make it easy for small teams or lonely coder to adopt, enhance or add some features.
  • Help new developers to join the team learn more and contribute fast.
  • Provide a friendly network of Tiki users/developers favoring mutual assistance and support.

In the 22 years since then, we have continued to promote this mission and these goals.

Tiki Software Community Association

The Tiki Software Community Association is an incorporated non-profit entity registered in Ontario province, Canada since May 29th, 2009 (Ontario Corporation Number 001796906) with the goal to benefit and support the ongoing work and development of the Tiki software community in the following ways:
  • Carrying out our Mission Statement
  • Providing stewardship of community trademarks
  • Managing funds received through affiliate partnerships and donations
  • Supporting community events to advance community cohesion and people networking
  • Overseeing community communications and public relations with other organizations
  • Supporting community-shared hardware infrastructure

Our Mission Statement

The mission of the Tiki Software Community Association is to foster the development of the free and Open Source software, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, and to promote the free use of this software by all who can benefit, particularly individuals, groups, and organizations for whom online collaboration will strengthen their communities and facilitate achieving their goals together. Additionally, as we "make software the wiki way", the Association welcomes the participation of developers and other individuals for mutual personal growth and social benefit.

Past

  • Tiki (originally known as TikiWiki) has been actively developed since 2002, making it a very mature web platform solution. The first public release of Tiki was in October 2002, by Luis Argerich. In July 2003, Tiki was named the SourceForge.net July 2003 Project of the Month.
  • More than 350 people have contributed source code to the Tiki project. 1
  • This makes Tiki one of the largest Open Source teams in the world.2

Huge Install Base

Tiki has been downloaded more than 1,300,000 times3 and is used to power a huge number of websites and intranets.4 Tiki is also available as a one-click install from many popular control panel applications such as Fantastico5 , script managers such as SimpleScripts6 , remote installers such as Installatron,7 and virtual appliances such as JumpBox8 . In 2010, Tiki was added to the Windows Web App Gallery,9 (retired on July 1, 2021) giving millions of Windows users easier access to Tiki.

Awards and Recognition

Tiki is constantly recognized as a leading Free / Libre / Open Source application. Tiki was selected as a mentoring organization for the 2009 Google Summer of Code and was one of only a handful of community-driven, FLOSS projects to be listed in the Seventh Annual EContent 10011 — a selection of organizations '"that matter most in the digital content industry."''

Tiki has also been nominated as the Most Collaborative Project for the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards12 and was named SourceForge Project of the Month.13

Tiki was named Best Web Application by OSDir Editors14 and consistently ranks in its listing of Top 10 Applications.15 InfoWorld awarded Tiki a 2010 BOSSIE (Best of Open Source Software) in the applications category, and in 2011 Tiki was named to CMS Report's Top 30 Web Applications.17 In 2012, Tiki was named Best Web Tool in WebHostingSearch.com's Web Tools Directory and awarded the People's Choice Best Free CMS in the Critic’s Choice CMS Awards19 .

In addition to these awards, Tiki has been listed as a recommended productivity tool by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and is included in the Open Source CMS Market Share Report's list of Top 20 Open Source CMS.

Present

The online environment has changed significantly from the days when Tiki and other software tools provided the primary mode of online communication and collaboration. Now huge corporate web platforms have become prominent and provide easy online destinations for individuals and organizations. Tiki continues to maintain technological relevance and viability as a web platform by emphasizing the importance of website users owning their data rather than ceding it to others, and by offering functional flexibility and configurability that aren't possible with the large commercial alternatives.

We Are Free, Libre and Open Source

Our social contract defines the "Tiki Principles." We leverage existing technologies and partner with field leaders whenever possible.

  • Tiki includes code from over 60 software libraries.
  • Tiki partners with other great projects, for WikiSuite, a server, web, mobile and desktop apps suite with a concerted effort for greater interoperability and security.

We Actively Develop

With a code commit every two hours22 (on average), Tiki undergoes continuous improvement and is always moving forward. As relevant new technologies are introduced (such as Bootstrap, Ajax, Vue.js, and others) we work to add them to Tiki.

Project facts (Source: openhub.net)

We Are Open Development

Tiki is a community-driven project, with a very open development model. Our "Wiki Way" of software development emphasizes collaboration on scale unlike most other applications.23

Number of contributors who made changes to the project source code each month (Source: openhub.net)

We "Eat Our Own Dogfood"

We say we eat our own dogfood. This means we don't just make software for others to use but we use it ourselves — we use Tiki to develop Tiki. For example:

  • Tiki Trackers are used to record feature requests and bug reports.
  • Tiki Forums are used by the community for discussions and troubleshooting.
  • Tiki Wiki pages and structures are used to develop end-user and developer documentation.

All of this dogfood results in tightly integrated well-tested features.

Future

Aware of our changing social and technological environment, we assess the present and prepare for the future. Large corporate online entities have become easy and popular ways for people to communicate, but we continue to be a viable option for those who want to maintain ownership of their data and who want to configure their online presence in unique and effective ways to meet their particular requirements.

The Tiki Software Community Association continues to create bridges and make use of available tools to further its ends. For example, we verified our nonprofit status for Techsoup Canada in order to qualify for Google Ad Awards for Nonprofits, so we can reach more potential users via Google ads, informing them of the features and advantages of a Tiki web presence. We also gained sponsorship for Elasticsearch hosted search services for tiki.org and its subdomains, so we can both offer these advanced search functions to our site users, and document the process for other Tiki site administrators.