[dev] RE: Tiki CMS/Groupware

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting Marc Laporte <tiki at marclaporte.com>:

> I am CCing a few members of the Tiki team.

I'm including the Horde dev mailing list.


> [ML] Did these discussions lead to any changes?

Not really. Most projects that have contacted us have wanted us to ditch our
framework and rewrite IMP to fit into theirs, which is not a direction that
we're interested in taking.

> [ML] In general, I want to open the communication lines between the Tiki
> team and all other major projects. I like to share features where possible.
> For example, a good cross-browser WYSIWYG editor with a multi-lingual
> spellchecker would be a great feature to share amongst many different
> projects. But if we don't share code/features, I'd like to share
> knowledge/experience. This is my first OS project (except as a user) so I'm
> learning a lot ;-)

Okay.

> [ML] I didn't consult my team on this so it may be a bit premature.
>  We have a basic webmail feature. However, I am not satisfied with its
> features & usability.  I notice that squirrelmail has modules (Xoops,
> Phprojekt, GroupWare felamimail). However, none really seem officially
> supported/endorsed by the Squirrel team.
>
> [ML] I haven't played with your other features but from what I understand,
> IMP is your flagship project and the most evolved. I think IMP webmail +
> Turba would be an excellent replacement for our module. However, I don't
> know how much work this represents.

See above. Horde is a highly developed, extremely featureful framework that has
been around and actively developed and improved for over 6 years now. IMP is
the oldest of the applications, and in the Horde 2.x current release version it
is still the flagship. Among the current development code, however, we have
things such as shared calendars, arbitrary links between objects in
applications to other applications, ... much more than I can possibly list. IMP
is no longer the focus or the flagship, and has not been for a while.

So I'm not really interested in re-tooling just IMP to fit into another
framework.

If anything, from our perspective, the obvious line of cooperation is for Tiki
to provide CMS features to the Horde Framework as a new Horde application. I'm
guessing that porting Tiki over to Horde isn't what you had in mind, and
probably gives you pause, but try seeing it from our perspective. That's why
these discussions are interesting, but it's hard for them to prove fruitful.

> [ML] We use the Smarty Template engine.
> [ML] We are moving to ADOdb for database independence in 1.8

We've used PEAR DB:: for a few years now and all of our code works with
databases from MySQL to Oracle to MS-SQL.

> [ML] I would like our webmail to be well embedded. Ex.: If someone clicks an
> email address on a wiki page, it should open the webmail for a new message.
> I would like the possibility to check several email accounts from on Tiki
> user account and the possibility to "share" a mailbox. Ideally, I would also
> like our inter-user messages to be accessible at the same place as the
> webmail (maybe in a folder).

I'd have no problems with creating a Horde Auth:: driver that knew how to read
Tiki authentication so that users could move seamlessly between them. As for
email links, we have an API call, available through our $registry object or via
XML-RPC, for generating email composition links into IMP.

The rest is either a feature of your IMAP server, or things that'd have to be
developed. If you guys would like to help develop these features in IMP, that'd
be great.

Regards,
-chuck

--
Charles Hagenbuch, <chuck at horde.org>
Born right the first time.