About the Tiki Documentation

Since the Tiki project started in 2002 there have been over 200 different developers working on over 50 separate releases (major & minor), creating hundreds of features, over 1000 preferences/settings, with over 1 million lines of code and 7500 wiki pages created in the tikiwiki.org domain.

Needless to say, developing an authoritative documentation for this open source project is challenging. From the beginning until version 1.6, the Tiki documentation was a one-man effort. The 1.6 Documentation complete with 350 fully illustrated pages with screenshots provided the basis for what exists at doc.tikiwiki.org today.

Since that version, the Tiki project has chosen to eat its own dogfood. Not unlike a baby learning to feed itself, the results have been a little messy. We now have more than 2300 wiki pages on http://tikiwiki.org with several pictures and miscellaneous useful content. But as it's wide open to collaboration, it's sometimes also unsorted (or sorted in too many various different ways), and with an unpredictable degree of updating.

Since the end of 2006, a new effort has been put from Tiki community to have another updated single file for printing (pdf) with all relevant Tiki documentation for 1.9 branch, relative to installation, configuration, features available and tuning process (see Table of contents). Some more pages relative to the new Tikiwiki 1.10.0? have been added already in http://doc.tikiwiki.org. By the time of this writing, this pdf document contained more than 850 numbered and indexed pages, to ease your off-line reading of documentation either in paper or pdf format. Moreover, this allows you make easier and faster searches of information in such a broad amount of pages covering most aspects of Tiki.

A method for creating current and well organized documentation

Despite the chaotic fertility tiki hackers demonstrate at tikiwiki.org, there is a real need for a real classic linear documentation for easy reference. Many tiki contributors asked for a direction where they can help, and the fact is that such collaborative documentation work requires a strong focal point so people can work in effective synchronicity. The Tiki documentation is a collaborative writing project.

The documentation plan.

The secret to a well made wiki is having a logical structure so everybody can figure out the structure of the objects (pages) in the project and process by which they are developed.

Document Structure
The document structure evolves organically. There is a Table of Contents, but lately, effort has been focused on developing a knowledge base from keywords. As such, the table of contents does not necessarily link to every page in the documentation, but it links to all the major topics, which may have their own sub-pages.

Anyone who has editing privileges in http://doc.tikiwiki.org can and should edit the table of contents page with the intention of making it better.

Documentation Procedure

The rules about how to document are controlled by via two important pages: the Style Manual and the Editorial Board. Documentation Status monitors requests for help etc.

• The Style Manual contains the current rules/guidelines of how the pages should look when complete.
• The Editorial Board decides on questions that need to be decided.
• Documentation Status is a dashboard that monitors documentation status tags in use in the documentation.

• you can change the style manual.
• you can join the editorial board.

The best example of a constructive change to the style manual is to create a specific rule that obeys a general rule that already exists. If you try to change an existing rule, expect some push-back, because you would be implying that all extant pages of the documentation should now be refactored to comply.

• you can join the editorial board

The editorial board is not a secret society. Anyone can join the editorial board by learning what the role entails and then linking to editorial board from their user page. Unless this person has displayed a strong tendency toward being a bad editor, this link will not be removed, and if the title sticks they can request and receive the necessary permissions.

Getting Support/Help

See: get help

From here:

• Welcome Authors
• Tiki Manual of Style
• Documentation Lifecycle
  • How To Tag
• Documentation Templates
  • Feature Page Template
• Documentation Status
• Printing the Documentation

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