Support.Mozilla.com (SUMO) is a customized version of Tiki.
Some aspects of Tiki were modified for high performance. New features & translations were added, bugs were fixed. Some user interface improvements were introduced, and of course, a nice theme was developed. Some features like
Staging and Approval were developed for Mozilla and later, were used for other projects.
Benefits for Mozilla
Mozilla was able to use, modify and extend an existing application and collaborate with an existing community to reach its goal of high quality, collaborative, multilingual support (forums, wiki, etc.). All this knowing that the enhancements could be contributed back and maintained by the community (Mozilla's core mission is not to maintain a CMS app)
Benefits for Tiki
Tiki gets great visibility and credibility. Mozilla, who could have picked any project, after exhaustive analysis, picked Tiki. Tiki volunteers were energized by the prospect that some of their developments, (ex.:
wiki-translation.com) would be used in a massive implementation. And Mozilla contributed back (upstreamed) a lot of the enhancements described above.
That's all nice, but how does that help you? How does this empower you and your community?
A lot of the code developed/improved for support.mozilla.com has been upstreamed and will part of version
3.0. And help is needed to upstreaming the rest. Everything that can be reasonably be made generic and that can be useful to the community at large is currently being upstreamed. So all the code will be open source.
Tiki has zillions of features. We are very pleased that many of these features are useful for support.mozilla.com but this is still yet only one
use case out of many.
So, when you install Tiki, you still need to configure it to do everything just like support.mozilla.com The nice thing is that you don't have to install several 3rd party modules. The not-so-nice thing is that you have to figure out among the hundreds of Tiki settings/options, which ones to turn on or off to get it working just right.
How about a support.mozilla.com profile? Shortly after 3.0 is released, we'll prepare this profile. So you could have, out-of-the-box (well actually a few click after installing) a Tiki configured in the same way. From there, you can configure/tweak/adapt. And this is what
David Tenser calls "Open Source Support".
This will increase the number of projects which use Tiki as high quality, collaborative, multilingual support site. And these project, we hope, will also choose to contribute.
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