This page is to explain/illustrate cultural & organizational differences between SUMO and Tiki.

These differences can lead to communication problems as communities may misunderstand each other. In reality, there is much more that is similar than different.

Actually, both Firefox and Tiki have things which are quite different than most open source projects.

Differences

Central Nervous System

In SUMO, the central nervous system is Bugzilla: (choose support.mozilla.com as the product): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi?format=advanced

  • log a bug (including feature request)
  • people comment, add patches
  • patches are tested
  • when approved, they are committed.



In Tiki, it's SVN.

  • Dev commits a fix or an enhancement (which may or may not be on WishList)
  • All active devs are watching svn commit list
  • It's reviewed, tested.
  • Comments/discussions can ensue.
  • If problem, there is an additional fix or a rollback.


That was for development version (trunk). Future 4.0, 5.0 etc.

In stable branch, all commits must first be approved by Quality Team.

Organization & priorities

Mozilla is a large organization with hundreds of employees.
SUMO is a project with about 6 people full-time. All work is logged and prioritized on Bugzilla. Things get done according to the priority set by the manager.

Tiki is a not-for-profit community project, with no employees. It's the aggregation of many organizations and companies that each have their priorities (like SUMO). They choose to collaborate to make Tiki progress and facilitate their work.

Scope


Firefox is one of the rare and probably the only open source project of this magnitude that has a business model. More Firefox users = More money for Firefox. SUMO is an implementation using a series of features in Tiki, for a specific goal of offering great support to Firefox users and increase satisfaction & userbase.

SUMO has load (Firefox has over 250 million users, SUMO has 3 million unique visitors per week, and about 10 million page views) and infrastructure (caching, load balanced, master/slave mysql) like no other Tiki site, and things need to be tested more (something may work well elsewhere but not there)

Tiki is a general purpose, Wiki-CMS-Groupware. Most Tiki sites run on shared servers.

Similarities

  • Both communities are massively committed to open source, open knowledge, open standards, collaboration, etc.
  • Both communities are fairly large (even if SUMO is much much larger, Tiki is large enough that it has it's own organizational culture and there is a learning curve).
  • All Tiki contributors are also Firefox users, and it's the most tested platform.
  • While Firefox is a browser (desktop app) and Tiki a Web-app (server app), and thus fundamentally different apps, they are both sides of a same coin, and complementary in the pursuit of open source, browser-based computing.


Things to do to improve collaboration

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Support/SUMO-Tiki-Collaboration


Specific advice for SUMO developers

  • SUMO features are positively things we want in the next version of Tiki.
  • If it's a new feature (ex.: Screencast support) it's perfectly ok to put in Tiki even if it's not as generic/good/whatever/etc. as you think it should be. Just tag it as experimental. Once it's in trunk, you'll get some feedback/help on how to make it more generic. Commit early, commit often.
    • For all design/css related things, you can commit as-is and indicate in commit message something along the lines of:
Example of commit message asking for help
Copy to clipboard
[ENH] Added new feature XYZ. It works, but style is still hard-coded to SUMO css/style.  Gary & luci: can you help make this better. We need a class for this button, and I am not sure which one to use to fit with recent improvements in theme system
  • No one is going to be mean or hurt you if you break something. The worst that can happen is that someone will tease you the next time you pop on IRC
    • Alternatively, you may feel guilted in buying someone a beer at the next TikiFest 😊
  • Please do join the SVN mailing list (you'll want a filter) because comments/questions on your commit will happen there.
  • If it's an enhancement of an existing feature, then, we just need to make sure that it doesn't break existing installs. But the enhancement itself can also be tagged as experimental.
  • If you have specific questions about a feature or whatever, would like some advice or help, and/or would like to know who is the best person to coordinate with, please contact marclaporte on IRC/email/etc. and/or write to the developers mailing list (200+ subscribers).
  • You don't have to log a bug to make a fix. Just commit to trunk and know it will be fixed when SUMO gets upgraded. Commit early, commit often.
  • http://tiki.org/Glossary


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