A Brief Description About The TikiWiki Tips and Tricks

What is TikiWiki?

TikiWiki is a CMS/Groupware which offers a large number of features "out-of-the-box" arguably more than any other Open Source Web Application. It can be overwhelming, even to an experienced user or administrator.

Since it is an open source CMS, TikiWiki is free. Developing a web content using TikiWIki is very challenging. TikiWiki, which commonly name as Tiki, has all the classic CMS and portal features of other applications, but also includes features not available anywhere else. Tiki is highly configurable and modular; all features are optional and can be administered through Tiki's browser-based interface.

Unlike other CMS web applications, Tiki has many features that you can utilize in an efficient manner. Using Tiki, you can do:

1. Create wiki pages
2. Post articles
3. Create blogs
4. Create forums
5. Upload files and store them in the galleries
6. Conduct a survey or poll
7. Make quizzes
8. Create calendars and events
9. Post comments
10. Send and receive messages and emails
11. Chat
12. Community and social networking
13. RSS feed for article, forum, blog, galleries
14. Ads management
15. and many more…

Tiki database used

Tiki can be developed using different types of databases such as Oracle and Postgress, but Tiki is well developed using mySql database.

Under the current version Tiki 6.3, there are 233 tables in the Tiki database to store data related with user management, admin management, article, category, file gallery, statistics, topics, freetag, blog, forum, message, email, calendar, object, wiki, chat, comment, voting, module, menu, logbook transaction.

It is better to understand phpMyAdmin database because using phpMyAdmin is very helpful in updating the Tiki’s tables and queries.

Tiki application programming

To easily develop user interface in updating data, Tiki use different types of web application programming.
Main web application programmings are:

• PHP: most of the tiki user interface are deployed using PHP. Therefore, understand PHP is a must to know the logical thinking on how Tiki works.
• Smarty template engine: is used as PHP template file format for user interface.
• CSS: is used to develop the look and feel of the website appearance.

Additional applications programming that are needed to support PHP:

• Ajax: is used for developing Tiki CKEditor
• Java Query
• HTML
• XML

Tiki file and directory environment

Tiki works by loading many files in many folders such in an integrated manner. The folders that you should know are:

1. Main folder: store the PHP files that mostly executed in the web address of an internet browser.
2. Templates folder: store the Smarty template engine files. Most of the files stored here have extension .tpl.
3. Styles folder: store the CSS files for customizing look and feel of the website appearance
4. Lib folder: consists libraries files needed to execute files in all Tiki folders.

Additionally, there are folders that support all the above folders such as images, modules, db, img, lang, installer, and temp.

Cautions

Tiki is programmed in a systematic and integrated manner. Editing, whether it's adding or subtracting one letter alone could lead to execution errors. Therefore, before doing the editing, make a backup of files that want to be edited.

Tips given here assumes that you are familiar with TikiWiki environment and have already understood programming language for web applications such as PHP, HTML, Java query, CSS, Smarty, Ajax, dan XML. In addition, you have also understood the databases processing application especially MySQL and phpMyAdmin.