The most recent TikiFest recently ended in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) on July 18. At this TikiFest, the second in Barcelona, more than 20 Tiki developers, consultants, and end-users met (including others via video conference) to work to improve and upgrade Tiki features, as well as to discuss the future of Tiki development.

Led by long-time Tiki Community members (including some board members of the Tiki Software Community Association) Marc (marclaporte), Louis-Philippe (lph), Jean-Marc (jyhem), Jonny (jonnyb) and Xavi (xavi), great progress was made for the next major Tiki release. Tiki 6, planned for October 2010), will include many of the items discussed and coded during this TikiFest, such as:

• Payment system using "CCLite" (a free software web application to support Community Currency management within and among barter networks)
• Fixing encoding issues (when upgrading Tiki under certain specific scenarios)
• Cron-like features (such as automatically changing tracker item status and sending email users if their tracker items do change within a specific amount of time. This is especially useful for Barter networks and Bug Trackers.
• Identifying ways (through the Newsletters and Group Watches featurse) to allow Tiki site administrators to easily distribute content to users, while allowing the users an option to unsubscribe
• New profile "Easy Blog" to easily install common blogging features (such as blog archives, image headers, etc.) for Tiki sites (http://profiles.tikiwiki.org/Easy+Blog )

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the release of its first promotional video: How to get help.

In this video, recorded in March 2010, Gary Cunningham-Lee explains how new Tiki Community members can get help with their Tiki sites. Gary is a long-time Tiki contributor and a member of the Tiki Software Community Association.



Watch the complete video at: http://bit.ly/ddczzU.

A series of video clips, released under a Creative Commons license, will be made available for interested parties. Daniel Gauthier, a member of the Tiki Community and the filmmaker of these clips says, "I've created these video clips for a very specific purpose: To help developers, technology decision makers and companies like ISPs who normally know about Open Source Development projects understand the richness of the Tiki Community."

If you are a Tiki user, administrator, or developer in Florida, USA, then you are invited to connect with your fellow Tiki-ers and help form the Florida Tiki User Group.

Recently a group of active Tiki Community Members, including Kimberly Fink (aka kimberlyf) and Ben Eason met to begin organizing a local users group for Tiki advocates in Florida. The group plans to meet periodically (both in-person and virtually), to share their experiences, learn how to improve their Tiki sites, and maybe even organize some TikiFests.

To learn more about the group, including how to start your own local Tiki user group, contact Kimberly Fink or visit http://tikiwiki.org/FloridaTikiUserGroup.

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is proud to announce its sponsorship of Recent Changes Camp 2010: Montréal to be held June 25-26-27 in Montréal, Canada. The event is a chance for everyone in the wiki community to meet and have a fun, productive conversation about our passion for wikis of all stripes.

Several members of the Tiki Community, including Marc Laporte, Nelson Ko, Louis-Philippe Huberdeau, Renoir Boulanger, Tanea Castro Durand and Daniel Gauthier, will be in attendance. For more information about RoCoCo 2010, see http://rococo2010.org.

Hot on the heels of Tiki 5.0, the Tiki community is proud to announce the releases of Tiki 4.3 and 3.6 LTS. Both versions included primarily fixes and patches. Users of Tiki 4.x and 3.x are encouraged to upgraded to this new release

The latest generation of Tiki is now available. This version, release 5.0, includes 3129 code contributions by more than 40 members of the Tiki community and features lots of new and improved functionality, including:

• Shopping cart, group subscriptions and payments
• Workspaces & perspectives: for efficient partitioning of large projects, with permission based dynamic content & preference filtering
• BigBlueButton web-conferencing integration (audio/video/chat/screensharing)
• WebDAV access to file galleries
• Performance improvements
• Advanced rating and scoring system,
• Improved translation/multilingual support - i18n
• Spreadsheets, using jQuery
• New themes (skins)
• and much more more

For complete information about this new release, see http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tiki5.


Tiki Branding Initiative
The Tiki 5.0 release also introduces a new Tiki branding strategy. The official name of the project changes from TikiWiki CMS/Groupware to Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. Additionally, a new logo is being introduced to help unify the project's vision, mission, and values. All Tiki community members are encouraged to help grow the Tiki brand. For complete information, see http://branding.tikiwiki.org.


Tiki Community Calendar
The Tiki Community calendar is now online at http://tikiwiki.org. This calendar lists upcoming events with presentations about Tiki, given by Tiki community members. The calendar also lists the upcoming TikiFests — community-driven events — in Montreal, Barcelona, New York City, Ottawa, and more. For complete information on TikiFests, see http://tikiwiki.org/tikifest.

The TikiFest, a tradition of the Tiki community, is a meeting between Tiki contributors (that usually only meet online). This is an opportunity to socialize, code wildly in group sessions, discuss wiki technology and culture, and plan the future of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. It is also a great opportunity for Tiki users to meet Tiki developers, and for each group to learn from the other.

The following TikiFests are being planned

• June 11-12, 2010 in Montréal, Canada
  See http://tikiwiki.org/TikiFestMontreal5 for details.
• July 19-25, 2010 in Barcelona, Spain
  See http://tikiwiki.org/TikiFestBarcelona2 for details.
• August, 2010 in Ottawa, Canada (Dates to be determined)
  See http://tikiwiki.org/TikiFestBigBlueButton for details.
• October 3-6, 2010 in New York City, USA
  See http://tikiwiki.org/TikiFestNewYork6 for details.
• November, 2010 in Europe (Location and dates to be determined)

This is your chance to get involved with the Tiki Community.

Several Tiki community members will be active participants at the upcoming Make Web Not War 2010 (MWNW), a Canadian cross-platform web conference that takes place May 27, 2010 in Montréal, Canada.

Tiki is a Community Partner of the event and will be featured as one of six web application demos during the Ignite Presentations (http://www.webnotwar.ca/schedule/).

As we get closer to the official Tiki5 release, you might notice some changes taking place among the Tiki websites (collectively called tw.o).

In addition the wealth of new features in Tiki5, this release also marks the start of a new branding and marketing strategy. You can learn more about the plan on the Tiki Branding web site (http://branding.tikiwiki.org). From the Branding website:

The purpose of this guide is to give you an overview of the key elements of the new design and a few examples of how to apply it.

A brand is more than just a logo. A brand communicates everything people think of (such as quality, value for money and trustworthiness) ... Thus the Tiki brand represents a set of values and principles that define us and should guide the way we all behave.

Please take a look through the Branding website. Be sure to post your comments, suggestions, and ideas. We're always looking for input from Tiki community members. If you have ideas, please consider joining a Tiki Team.

While beta testing of the upcoming Tiki 5.0 release is well underway, the Tiki community continues to grow with two exciting new features: Video and Online Collaboration. The community is actively "dogfooding" these features — all community members are invited to join and learn more.

Video Collaboration
Kaltura (http://www.kaltura.org/) is an open source, community supported online video and rich-media solution. Support for Kaltura was begun in Tiki 4 with the ability to configure your Kaltura registration information within Tiki, and a Tiki wiki plugin to embed Kaltura media in a wiki page.

In the future, Tiki developers are adding the ability to remix videos, specify specific user access and permissions, and tight integration with Tiki file galleries.

See http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Video for details on this integration.


Online Collaboration
BigBlueButton (http://bigbluebutton.org/) is an open source, real-time collaboration tool that includes audio, video, screensharing, and chat components. Initial development includes single sign on from Tiki and an extension of Tiki permissions to create, join, and invite users to meetings.

Long-term plans include tight integration with many Tiki features such as scheduling events with the Tiki calendar, saving chats and video recordings to Tiki file galleries, and using Tiki payment system for paid events.

See http://dev.tikiwiki.org/BigBlueButton for details on this integration.