The Galaxia Workflow Engine has been retired from Tiki4 and is superseded by Category Transitions, which serve the same general purpose, but are much more tightly integrated.

Similar to workspaces vs the AulaWiki mod, Workflows will be created and managed by using existing Tiki features (categories, wiki pages, trackers, etc)


Lesson about tight integration
Galaxia was not tightly integrated within Tiki. It had a different name, different file naming, distinct documentation, etc. The goal was that it would be a shared resource with other open source PHP projects. While several other projects did use Galaxia as a base, there was never any significant contributions back. (ex.: we could have shared XML workflows between different projects). In consequence, we had the negatives of not being well integrated, while not having the benefits of real collaboration with other projects.

Lesson learned :-)

Category transitions are tightly integrated in Tiki.


Lesson about who will use the tool
Galaxia was intended as a tool for programmers with the goal of making their job easier. As you can see in the GalaxiaManual, you had to create your DB tables for data and some .php/.tpl code. This barrier to entry has reduced the potential contributors pool. And for programmers, they could just as simply use Tiki as a framework.

Another contributing factor: power users have used trackers, and wiki plugins to build surprisingly advanced workflows. Thus, the need for Galaxia decreased.

Lesson learned :-)

Category transitions will be accessible to power users. And since it reuses existing features, people will be able to use trackers to manage data (instead of creating MySQL tables) and use tiki-admin_transitions.php and Wiki syntax to build their workflows.

To be clear, Galaxia is a dead project and sites/pages are only kept for posterity. There is no Galaxia code in Tiki since Tiki4 (although it will live forever in SVN on SourceForge).

Tiki is awesomely active project. To see what you may have missed during the past two years:

• Tiki 2 (Aug 2008): http://doc.tiki.org/Tiki2
• Tiki 3 (May 2009): http://doc.tiki.org/Tiki3
• Tiki 4 (Nov 2009): http://doc.tiki.org/Tiki4
• Tiki 5 (June 2010): http://doc.tiki.org/Tiki5
• Tiki 6 (planned Oct 2010): http://doc.tiki.org/Tiki6