The Wiki

The Wiki is a collaboration environment where the users can edit the pages they read. Links to wikipages are created automatically using capitalized words smashed together. A special editing syntax is used to provide features such as bold text, images, external links etc. A history is kept for each page so admins can view diffs and rollback a page to a previous version if a user breaks a page. Wikis can be used for documentation, support, intranets, and many other uses. The Tiki Wiki system has all the normal features Wikis have plus a lot more.

Individual pages or groups of pages called structures may be be configured to require user or group priviledges in order to view and or edit them.

Image Galleries

Image galleries are collections of images, users can create galleries and upload images to their galleries or public galleries. You can select the number of thumbnails to appear in rows/files of galleries as well as the thumbnails size. Thumbnails are automatically created by Tiki, you don’t have to upload them. Galleries can be used for albums, stories, showrooms and many other applications.

Articles and Submissions

The articles & submissions system allows editors to publis articles, articles can belong to a topic and topics can be administered, the articles can use an image or the topic image, you can set up the publishing date of any article
allowing you to program articles for the future. The article content can use the Wiki syntax or regular HTML. Links and images in articles are automatically cached to prevent content that resides in other pages from disappearing from your articles. The CMS system has also submissions, users can send ‘proposed articles’ as submissions and the editors can edit the submissions, remove them or approve them becoming articles. There’s a home page where the last “n” articles are shown. With this CMS system you can easily set-up a site like you did using systems such as PHPNuke or PostNuke.

Blog System

Blogs are great and they are ver popular today of course we have blogs J. A weblog is a collection of “posts” ordered by date, it’s like a Journal on the web. A post can be a comment about something the user did, a review, a thought, anything. The Tiki Blogs system is quite powerful, users can create blogs and of course post entries into their blogs or public blogs. If you want you can choose a Blog and make it appear as the home page of the site. Tiki also implements the Blogger XMLRPC interface allowing you to use applications such as wBloggar or Blogbuddy to manage and edit weblogs.

Dynamic Content System

The Dynamic Content System (DCS) is a very simple concept, you can edit blocks of HTML code or text from a admin screen and you can display a block in any Tiki template or user module. Updating the block content will update the template. You can also program block content by date storing several blocks to be displayed in future dates. This simple system adds a lot of flexibility to Tiki, you can display anything you like anywhere in the screen and you can set-up portions that can be changed or that change atomatically along time.

The DCS can be used for example:

• To display a quote in the top bar or a user module
• To display news in a user module
• To announce products, chats, news according to time
• To announce any event
• To display sport results or sports information
• Anything!

File Galleries

The file galleries section of Tiki is a download manager, you can create/edit file galleries which are collections of files, you can define with the permission system who can create file galleries, upload files and download files. Statistics are recorded for each download, rankings where defined for the top downloaded files, most visited file galleries and last uploaded files. Modules are also available to display last changed file galleries, last uploaded files, top downloaded files and top visited file galleries.

You can use file galleries to distribute free multimedia (mp3, avis, etc), to distribute software (versions, patches, releases), to add files that users can download from Wiki pages, articles or weblog posts, etc.

Featured Links

The featured links section is just a link manager, you can enter as many links as you want and there’s an user module to display the links in the order that you want. Clicking the links will open the site in a frame inside the central section of Tiki. Statistics are kept about the number of times that featured links were visited and you can automatically order featured links by the number of hits they had.

Comment System

Comments are used to provide user-feedback to many Tiki features: users can comment: Wiki pages, image galleries, file galleries, articles and polls. The comment system can be configured to allow users to vote comments, a karma system mantains a “level” for each user the level improves when a user comment is voted by another user. Good qualified users votes add more points to a comment than users who didn’t get good qualifications. Comments can be displayed/hidden using simple controls and the user can control how to sort votes, the number of votes to see by page and the minimum threshold (score) for a vote to be displayed.

Forum System

Forums are a must-have feature for a community site, a forum is a collection of topics and each topic is a collection of user messages about that topic. Using Tiki you can configure as many forums as you want and stablish permissions to determine who can create forums, admin forums, create topics, post messages, vote messages, etc. Individual permissions can be set for forums so you can have private forums only visible to some user groups. The forums section in Tiki has many advanced features such as auto -prunning to prevent the base of messages growing to big, flood-preventing, sticky topics, locked topics etc. The forums section in this manual describes all the user-level features for forums while the admin section of forums in this manual will describe how to admin the forums system.

Chat Rooms

Chatrooms are an experimental feature in Tiki, admins can create chat channels and the users can join the channels, once in a channel users post messages that are broadcasted to all the users in the same chatroom. Chatroom messahes are updated at a given interval that can be configured for each chat channel (you may want a channel to refresh faster than others). Future Tiki version might add new features such as private channels, moderated chats, etc.

Poll System

Polls are another typical feature in user-community sites, using Tiki you can create as many polls as you want and display from zero to “n” polls in the Tiki pages, you can also have a set of “active” polls and display only one poll in the page, in such a case Tiki will rotate through the set of active polls. Users with the right permission can vote polls, see poll results, examine old polls and vote any poll that is not “closed”.

Category System

Categories are a way to classify Tiki objects (Blogs, Image galleries, Articles, Polls, Forums, Wiki Pages, File Galleries). You can create a ctaegory tree creating categories and adding as many sub-categories as you want to any category. Any Tiki object can then be added to one or many categories if you want. The user will be able to use a category browser navigating the category tree with links to the objects in the category. This can be used to let the users find all the information your Tiki site has about a specific topic/subject regardless if the information is in an article, a weblog or a file gallery.

In future versions categories can be used for other powerful features such as stablishing permissions per category etc.

FAQ System

FAQs (Frequently asked questions) are lists of common questions and answers about a specific topic. FAQs are a very common tool in communities to group popular questions and have them solved in a common place without the need to repeat the same answer multiple times. Tiki allows you to create as many FAQs as you want with any number of questions in each FAQ, users will be able to browse FAQs and read the questions and their answers.

Quiz System

Quizzes can be used for fun, for trivia, for contests or for courses and elearning sites. A quiz is made of a number of multiple-choice questions, each option in a question can be assigned positive or negative points. After the user takes a Quiz Tiki computes the score and an aswer can be displayed to the user depending on his score. You can control if quizzes can be repeated and you can indicate a time limit for Quizzes. If you want Quiz results can be stored and you can review the result of any stored quiz and the user answers. Stats are always stored for Quizzes keeping track of the results of each quiz.

HTML Pages

Tiki offers a simple way for creating pages that will be displayed to the users and that can be linked from/to any place in your site, just create an HTML page using the editor and then you can access it using tikipage. php?pageName=some. This simple systemcan be extended with the addition of dynamic pages. A dynamic page is an HTML page where you can use the syntax {ed id=foo} to create dynamic sections inside the page, an editor will be automatically available to edit each dynamic zone of a dynamic page. Dynamic pages will be automatically updated without a browser refresh and without making the user refresh the page. So dynamic pages are great for sport scores, stock information, real time coverage of events or other users that you may imagine.

Survey System

Surveys can be used to poll the opinion of users in your site. You can create surveys using different question formats. You can use short-text questions, multiple-choice questions, single-choice questions and two different rate questions. Users can fill the surveys and then you/users can check the stats.

Tracker System

Trackers are a powerful and flexible tool. Trackers are used to keep a record of a collection of items and you can set up what fields items will have per tracker. Then you can add/remove items, list items, comment items, attach files to items etc. Items can be assigned to user/groups and if the item is open it will appear in the user-preferences screen. Trackers/items can be monitored by email. You can use trackers for support tickets, feature requests, buying orders, bug reporting, feedback reporting, submission of news, etc etc. Many workflows can be modeled using one or more trackers.

Newsletter System

The newsletters feature allow admin to define as many newsletters as he want, users can subscribe to newsletters and a email confirmation is required to prevent spamming. Then admin can send HTML based newsletters to the subscribed and confirmed users to a newsletter. This can be used to communicate your site news, broadcast site events etc.

Directory System

This feature is similar to the Dmoz directory or other links directories. Admins can create a tree of unlimited categories. Categories can be related. Links are assigned to one or many categories. The user can browse links navigating the categories or searching. Users can suggest links that may need to be validated by an admin before being posted. Some rankings displaying the last sites or the most popular sites are supported. Modules to display some rankings or stats for the directory are also provided.

My Tiki

Logged users can enjoy a lot of features entering the My Tiki section, all this features can be enabled/disabled by admin. The MyTiki section contains the following features:

• WebMail
• UserMessaging
• UserNotepad
• UserTasks
• UserFiles
• UserMenus
• UserPreferences
• UserBookmarks
• UserModules
• Newsreader

User Messaging

Users can send messages to other tiki users and read/reply/remove messages in their mailboxes. Messages can have a priority and the user may choose to be notified by email when important messages are recived by Tiki. The user can close his mailbox from this user preferences screen and he will not receive messages. Messages can be flagged for follow up. Admins can send broadcast messages to all the users in a Tiki site. A module to display the number of unread messages is also included. User with permission can send messages to all the members of a group.

User Notepad

Using the notepad users can write notes, upload notes, download notes and read notes. Notes can be read as raw text files or as wiki pages intepreting the wiki markup syntax. The user-quota that admin can control is used to control the maxmim size that user notes can take.

User Tasks

User tasks let the user set-up to-do tasks and then view the current tasks, mark them as done or delete them. A task can be programmed to be activated in future date. A module that let’s the user manipulate tasks is provided.

User Files

This feature can be used to let users store personal files in a Tiki site they can upload files and then download them when they want. A quota can be setup to control the maximum size of personal files per-user.

User Menus

Using user menus the user can add personal items to the User Menu section in the application menu. An option is provided to let the user automatically add all the top level bookmarks to his personal menu.

User Preferences

User preferences let the user sleect all the user-level preferences for the site like his personal Avatar, time zone, theme, language etc.

User Bookmarks

User bookmarks let users bookmark internal or external pages, create folders and organize his personal bookmarks in folders. Bookmarks can be cached if that option is enabled. A module is provided to let the users see his bookmarks navigate them and add new bookmarks.

User Modules

The user modules section when enabled let the users configure the position and appearance of modules in the left and right columns of a Tiki site.

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