[Tikiwiki-devel] PHP5 and Smarty-ng (n-tier / enterprise TikiWiki)

[Michael D. <Michael.Davey@CodeRage.ORG>]

Hi,

With PHP5 not too far away and the Smarty guys threatening to overhaul 
their code to take advantage of PHP5's new features, what are our plans 
for TikiWiki.
I ask because I am continuing to investigate splitting TikiWiki into a 
presentation and a business-logic tier and the proposed new features for 
Smarty would make this much easier.

However, even without PHP5 and Smarty-ng, the changes to the TikiWiki 
source would be fairly dramatic.  I'm not sure how feasible it would be 
to make the entire change optional but I certainly wouldn't want to see 
the code fork in the community sense.

One possibility might be to start the often-muted Tiki2 branch later 
this year and separate into tiers there, with a hopeful alpha release in 
the second half of 2007.  Thus Tiki2 would be PHP5 and Smarty-ng (or 
whatever they decide to number it) only and could give us the 
opportunity of loosing some of the more esoteric legacy features.

I really don't know where to go with this - technically it is possible 
to break tikiwiki into multiple tiers and from prior experience I think 
it would improve the structure of the code and have a very positive 
impact on performance, but I won't start work without a clear roadmap 
and community backing.

-- 
Michael