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    • Re: Re: Re: Tiki and Webdav

    Posted by Marc Laporte posts: 1647 Canada

    Hello Eric,

    My goal is also not to upset you but I’ll provide candid advice. I get the feeling that you have in mind to use Tiki for an important, long term project. Thus, you want a certain level of reliability/comfort before you get into it. I get that.

    I suggest you change your choice of words. Tiki is free source software. You are free to use it but you are not entitled any one else’s time. Using words like “Alarming” “Die” “horrifying” will not make people want to collaborate with you.

    A few reactions below.

    However, I found it -literally- horrifying. Perhaps I'm accustomed to the kind of user-community support I get with Joomla, but there were several aspects of your reply that seriously bring using TikiWiki into question. So for the moment, I'm going to talk to you about process instead of my broken TikiWiki


    I encourage you to read up on the Tiki Model, especially this part:
    http://tiki.org/Model#Why_don_t_you_fix_improve_the_existing_features_instead_of_adding_new_ones_

    , which I will eventually either discard or pay for support for. This may be open-source software, but if it's not run like a professional project, it will fail.


    Tiki is a success with the current model
    http://tiki.org/Model#The_Tiki_model_can_t_work

    After all there are other wikis out there! I'm not trying to insult you, but what I read in your replies got me very, very worried. This may sound like a rant, but consider for a moment that it contains some very important observations:

    Are you judging Tiki because of some replies you got in the forums? and because of one feature that is not working for you?

    In the admin panel where you activated WebDAV, it reads: "These features are relatively new, or recently underwent major renovations. You should expect growing pains and possibly a lack of up to date documentation, as you would of a version 1.0 application"

    1) The documentation is terrible.


    I even added a section to cover your question 😊
    http://tiki.org/Model#Documentation

    2) The forums are terrible.


    See my conclusion below.

    3) The word FREE appears in your response twice. Either this software is free or it's not.


    Tiki is a free source application. LGPL 2.1

    Again, take a look at Joomla - they have it figured out. Joomla developers and users don't grudgingly carve out some time to write code or support it: they allocate time in their lives for the project and then dedicate themselves during that time so that they don't feel taken advantage of. If you volunteered at the local hospital, you wouldn't keep reminding the patients how busy you were, would you? Joomla's forums are not starved for attention. The first sign of this was that the first reply asked me - a user - to join the developer's network. Bad idea: you don't want me writing code or documenting functionality I can't understand! That's how you got the documentation you have.



    Why are you antagonizing the people that are trying to help you?

    I am not very familiar with the Joomla! ecosystem. However, this seems like a very broad generalization. Throughout a large community, you will see all kinds of behaviors. Some will be very active and support a module and some will just leave it do die, and anything between those two extremes.

    Your example of the hospital makes no sense. If you are a volunteer at the hospital to help people with directions (for example), and someone asks you to take their blood pressure, (and you are not qualified to do that), you will try to point them in the right direction.

    Community members participate the documentation, forums and mailing lists as volunteers. Tiki has tons of features, so people tend to know only a subset. They can choose to try to help you, but they may not know the answer to your specific question.

    4) When a user says that they can't user your system with Windows or Mac, you don't tell them to go to Linux. This is groupware for COLLABORATION. People don't want to change all their other applications in order to collaborate. If I create a spreadsheet in Excel and want to share it with a customer, I'm not going to switch to Linux and make them switch to Linux to share it. I love Linux, but you can't make the world switch by writing TikiWiki. Your comment about never having to pay for software was alarming. It says that you don't understand business. Businesses use windows and Mac. TikiWiki *must* work with them, or die. My little business got a chance to grow because of open source software, but it still needed to follow some standards to do it.


    “Alarming”? “Die”?

    I see nothing alarming. He said “And sorry, no idea about win7 (never needed to pay for that software, and never tried it)” He didn’t say he didn’t think Tiki shouldn’t work with it. He said that he can’t help you because he doesn’t use that software.

    I think you are over reacting here. There are tons of software which do not work on Windows and Mac and they will not “die”. And nobody ever said that the goal was that Tiki not work. Tiki has always been multi-platform. It’s browser-based software!

    5) I don't think you understand why people use WebDAV.



    Xavi has been pushing for years for the inclusion of WebDAV in Tiki. He participated to a previous iteration which never was added to the core http://tiki.org/TikiDavDev

    So he understands very well. He wants an easier user experience for end-users. Double-click, edit, save.

    Open source software offered my small business the advantages of low startup cost and great innovation. But nobody in business expects anything to be free, they just like good value. I will pay a consultant to help me get this working, but I'm going to limit his time to 2 hours to keep from trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. I'm actually worried I won't find a consultant who understand what a business needs, after reading your post.


    With this attitude, perhaps no one will want to work with you!

    http://tiki.org/Model#What_is_the_business_model_

    I suggest to first get it going for one platform first and make sure that is OK. Then, try to figure out why it’s not working for the others. I have seen in the past that Vista needed to be patched for WebDAV to work. Not a Tiki bug but indeed a bug in MS Vista.

    Again, this wasn't written to upset you, but for everyone on this project to see and think about: if you don't understand your customer - even for a free product - you won't have one in short order. It's great if this is a play project for developers, but from the web site it looks like it's aimed at being more than that, which is why I started to use it.


    I think you should seriously read up on the following documents to know what you are getting into:
    http://tiki.org/Model
    http://tiki.org/SWOT
    http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/abs/html/mags/so/2009/06/mso2009060004.htm


    Now, if you indeed have a serious project and are looking to pick a platform. I suggest:

    1. Try out all the features you think you will need and make a global evaluation (vs just one feature)
    2. Compare that to other solutions (Joomla!, etc.)
    3. Pick the best one for you through a rigorous evaluation. Once you have picked it, resist the urge to change your mind or to complain.
    4. Roll your sleeves up and commit to making it work.
    5. Get in touch with the developers of those features and try to work out an arrangement to take the features to the level you need them to be. If that doesn't work, find a developer somewhere that can make it happen


    That is how I run a successful business!

    Best regards,

    M 😉

    Reads: 1544
    Posted by Peder Kittelson posts: 4

    Hi, I am enjoying Tiki very much. Thank you. The features are great. I am having some difficulty with features that don't work right - like the tiki html editor hspace. In general, it is a great system that I am glad to use and I am trying to learn how to be a developer of it as well, I don't see much of a way to use the system, except as a developer too. Unfortunately I also need to deliver a product to my clients in real time.

    I am trying to understand what "Long Term Support" means. I am running 5.3 right now and cannot decide whether to upgrade to 6.1. Version 6.x is supposed to have, "Long Term Support." Does that mean if bugs are fixed in version 7 or 8 that the fix will be back-ported to version 6.x as well?

    If I fix something in 5.3, will that be overwritten in 6.x with the old bug? Maybe so. I am trying to decide whether I should not try to fix something because it will be fixed in the next version, or just stay in one version and provide my own long term support.

    This is a classic issue. What is the balance between, "Getting it done," and "Getting it right?" Both need to be present for things to work. I just need to know how the versions are going to be done with reference to "Long Term Support," and whether I should just expect to go to one version that has the features I need and spend a considerable amount of time working on that version and not upgrade. I think a number of people are just sitting on a version they trust - trust is an important part of all this.

    Thanks for all your time and energy. And I hope to see several of you in Portland this summer. And I want to make contributions too.

    Posted by Peder Kittelson posts: 4

    Update: I did upgrade to 6.1 and it is much better for editing Web pages. I congratulate those who brought in the new Html editor. It is way better.

    Thanks to you,


    P.