The Interledger Community 🌱: Marc Laporte

Tiki ILP Integration and Monetization — Final Grant Report

Marc Laporte — Sun, 29 Aug 2021 21:28:56 +0000

Project Update

The solution is integrated on WikiSuite — a comprehensive and integrated Open Source information suite designed for enterprise use. The main component of WikiSuite is Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware (or "Tiki") which is a full-featured web application platform and arguably the one with the most built-in features.

To implement the solution's ability to seamlessly send and receive payments, the development team have integrated Interledger Protocol (ILP) payments with Tiki. Similarly, to provide efficient web monetization, Tiki now integrates an implementation of Coil — an open web monetization technology that ensures compatibility with competing services and any currency. These steps make possible seamless online transactions and web monetization capabilities in WikiSuite to enable the WikiSuite communities and end-users to enjoy excellent payment and monetization features.

We are very happy to state that we have completed all required developments, despite the challenges encountered!

The team has successfully completed the design and development and has thoroughly tested the new features in a designed prototype, in accordance with our revised planning and timeline. This designed prototype will also enable streamlining the testing processes of the solution in the future. The new web monetization feature is integrated in the latest Tiki version — Tiki 23 — released in August 2021. The Interledger Protocol (ILP) payments has been coded for Tiki 24, which is available now in daily builds, and will be released in February 2022.

Progress on objectives

The first objective was to make Tiki fully compatible with ILP for sending and receiving payments, and with Coil for web monetization. Integration with ILP was more difficult than expected, but we found a way to succeed. This will be described in more detail in the next section. Also, as mentioned in our previous progress report, the integration with Coil has been completed. The team has implemented a new administration panel preference to activate monetization of an entire Tiki website, and a wiki plugin (a kind of macro placed in wiki text) named "Plugin Coil" enables monetization of specific content. With this feature, Tiki is capable of efficiently and easily enabling monetization of a complete website or selected contents of the website.

The second objective was to guide Tiki's Open Source community in regard to the various opportunities and challenges that come with the ILP and Coil integrations. The WikiSuite team discussed the experience acquired during the implementation of these integrations at the recent TikiFest online meeting in June. The community also organizes monthly roundtable meetings during the year. We will take advantage of these online meetings to thoroughly inform and support all community members — developers, power users, and other interested people — in the configuration and use of these features.

The last objective was to help end-users of WikiSuite and Tiki technologies better manage money online and benefit from the new features and their opportunities. The WikiSuite team has been writing detailed documentation to guide end-users in configuring and using these features. During the next few weeks, we are going to publish the latest features and updates on social media to engage and provide awareness to as many people as possible. Our objective is to promote the use of Tiki for web monetization and/or ILP payment.

Key activities

Website monetization enables Tiki website administrators to monetize the website or some of its contents using Coil. With this new feature, the WikiSuite team made it possible for any Tiki user to monetize the pages or content they create at a Tiki website.

The latest features provide the ability to :

Activate and configure website monetization in a Tiki administration panel (default site pointer and a paywall text);
Allow every Tiki user to configure their own pointer (wallet) for website monetization;
Use the new wiki Plugin Coil to monetize specific content, acting like a paywall in that only paying viewers can access the content.

All details about the web monetization features are in our mid-progress report.
Code changes are shown in the merge request: https://gitlab.com/tikiwiki/tiki/-/merge_requests/767.
Demo website to experiment with the new web monetization feature: http://grantfortheweb.wikisuite.org/.

Processing Online Payments : Create modules and integrate ILP in Tiki websites for sending and receiving online payments for products or services.

As a way to enable fair and open access to enable payments in Tiki, we added support to leverage Interledger payments. Tiki currently already has the building blocks for e-commerce and subscriptions, so we added support for payments using Interledger. The approach taken was to build a library that would offer a consistent interface to request payments using multiple providers, and have that library published as an asset by itself, and then integrate that library in Tiki. Thus, the Tiki website owner will mostly need to just supply the credentials of the platform/wallet to use and the process will work.

First, we developed a new PHP package for ILP. In addition, the library code is here : https://gitlab.com/tikiwiki/libraries/ilp-client.
Then, we merged a new experimental feature in Tiki to use with the package, to permit payments using ILP. Code changes are shown in the merge request. The merge request has all the code, but is pulling the package directly from packagist.org instead of composer.tiki.org.

Basically, to make the new feature functional in a compatible Tiki instance (all details are in the Tiki documentation):

Running the ILP moneyd local test network and the ILP SPSP Invoice Server
MoneyD allows you to run an isolated local test network for development. The ILP SPSP is a basic protocol for exchanging payment information between payee and payer to facilitate payment over Interledger. In our case Tiki is the client, that talks to the SPSP server.
Set up the Tiki ILP payment feature and a basic cart
From the Tiki control panels.
Test an order
Add a product to your cart, click Check-out in the right panel to obtain the ILP pointer for the payment. Copy the link and paste it back at your ILP network command line to send the money. Reload the page or Check Payment.

Detailed documentation providing details about the latest features

As planned, we obviously wrote documentation to enable the Tiki community of users to leverage the advanced, efficient, and easy mechanism for online payments and website monetization. This documentation is incorporated at the Tiki comprehensive documentation website. For the record, here are the new documentations added :

Communications and marketing

To take full advantage of the developments funded by this project, we have undertaken an ambitious communication project. We have invested in buying ads on several of the major social media. We bought and configured our ad campaigns, and are going to launch them early in September. These campaigns will run for a few weeks each and will be launched on several social media simultaneously. Our principal objective is to promote WikiSuite as an Open Source software enabling web monetization with Coil and payment with Interledger. We are currently finalizing the preparation of visual materials to make our advertisements as attractive as possible. To see our future advertisements, kindly follow WikiSuite on the various social media:

Next Steps

At this time, the feature development is completed and tested. Of course, these features will require improvement after more real use, but as usual our community will maintain these properly.

We have discussed web monetization and Interledger payments with our more active community members during the TikiFest and roundtable meetings. We will continue to talk about them in the future events as well.

Documentation has been written and published on doc.tiki.org. Users of Tiki 23 can now activate and use the web monetization feature, and developers and power users with a Tiki 24 (trunk environment) can experiment with Interledger payments.

In conclusion, all our objectives have been achieved. In addition, we prepared our communication plan and purchased advertising. The remaining task is to complete some details before launching the campaigns, which will be the last step in this project.

We are very grateful for this opportunity offered by Grant for the Web, which enabled to us to improve our Open Source software with new features that will be of great value to website owners and end users.

Benefits of Community Support

We are very actively engaged in the development and improvement of Open Source technologies. Anyone interested in our solution is welcome to join our active community and start contributing now at https://gitlab.com/tikiwiki. Also, if you have any questions about WikiSuite or these new features, please feel free to join our chat room at https://wikisuite.chat/. We look forward to meeting new members!

Tiki ILP Integration and Monetization — Grant Report #1

Marc Laporte — Mon, 31 May 2021 14:21:46 +0000

Project Update

The proposed solution is based on WikiSuite — a comprehensive and integrated Open Source information suite designed for enterprise use. The main component of WikiSuite is Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware (or "Tiki") which is a full-featured web application platform and arguably the one with the most built-in features.

To implement the proposed solution's ability to seamlessly send and receive payments, the development team intends to integrate Interledger Protocol (ILP) payments with Tiki. Similarly, to provide efficient web monetization, Tiki will integrate an implementation of Coil — an open web monetization technology that ensures compatibility with competing services and any currency. These steps will make possible seamless online transactions and web monetization capabilities in WikiSuite to enable the WikiSuite communities and end-users to enjoy excellent payment and monetization features.

Regarding the integration with ILP, the development team encountered some unforeseen difficulties. We explain the challenges we encountered in the "Key Activities" section.

For web monetization, the team utilized the Coil API to create a plugin that allows website administrators to manage the monetization. The process also involved the development of advanced features enabling multiple authors or administrators to monetize their digital content on the same website.

During the process of solution design and development, the development team faced an unexpected inconvenience as the Technical Team Lead resigned due to unavoidable circumstances, thereby causing a delay in the estimated project timeline. The process of finding and assigning a new Team Lead caused a three-month increase in the project timeline. The team deeply appreciates the Grant for the Web Program team granting the WikiSuite team a no-cost extension.

The development team revised the planning and timeline with the new Technical Team Lead and is glad to be back on track again. The team has successfully completed the initial design and development and has thoroughly tested the new features on a designed prototype. This designed prototype will also enable streamlining the testing processes of the solution in the future as well. The newly developed web monetization features will be integrated in the latest Tiki version — Tiki 23 — which will be released in July 2021.

Progress on objectives

The first objective is to make Tiki fully compatible with ILP for sending and receiving payments, and with Coil for web monetization. Integration with ILP is currently not as far along as we would like, but we continue to work on it and make steady progress. On the other hand, the integration with Coil has been completed. The team has implemented a new administration panel preference to activate monetization of an entire Tiki website, and a wiki plugin (a kind of macro placed in wiki text) named "Plugin Coil" enables monetization of specific content. With these steps, Tiki will be capable of efficiently and most easily performing monetization of the complete website or selected contents of the website. Fully complete Coil integration will be provided in Tiki 23. The ILP integration continues and will be completed as soon as the challenges encountered have been met.

The second objective is to guide Tiki's Open Source community in regard to the various opportunities and challenges that come with the ILP and Coil integrations. The WikiSuite team will, for example, thoroughly explain and discuss the experience acquired during the implementation of these integrations in the upcoming TikiFest along with discussing opportunities created by the development of the new features that enable seamless processes to send and receive payments, and perform website monetization. TikiFests are a tradition in the Tiki community where community members — developers, power users, and other interested people — from around the globe meet in person or, recently, virtually, to discuss the latest advancements, challenges, and opportunities in the Tiki sphere and other related technologies and culture.

The last objective is to help end-users of WikiSuite and Tiki technologies better manage money online and benefit from the new features and their opportunities. In the upcoming few weeks, the WikiSuite team will begin writing detailed documentation to guide end-users in configuring and using these features. Also, the team plans to publish the latest features and updates on social media to engage and provide awareness to as many people as possible.

Key activities

Website monetization enables Tiki website administrators to monetize the website or some of its contents using Coil. The WikiSuite team aims to make it possible for any Tiki user to monetize the pages or contents they own at a Tiki website.

The latest features provide the ability to :

Activate and configure website monetization in a Tiki administration panel (default site pointer and a paywall text):
Allow every Tiki user to configure their own pointer (wallet) for website monetization:
Use wiki Plugin Coil to monetize specific content, acting like a paywall in that only paying viewers can access the content:

Using default paywall text

{COIL()}
The content you're viewing in exclusive. 
Thank you for your contribution.
{COIL}

With a custom paywall text

{COIL()}
The content you're viewing in exclusive. 
Thank you for your contribution.
{ELSE}
This content is exclusive!
To view this content you need to use the Coil extension.
{COIL}

Users can monetize their content.

{COIL(user="admin")}
The content you're viewing in exclusive. 
Thank you for your contribution.
{ELSE}
This content is exclusive!
To view this content you need to use the Coil extension.
{COIL}

Code changes are shown in the merge request: https://gitlab.com/tikiwiki/tiki/-/merge_requests/767
Demo website to experiment the new web monetization feature: http://grantfortheweb.wikisuite.org/

Processing Online Payments : Create modules and integrate ILP in Tiki websites for sending and receiving online payments for products or services.

As a way to enable fair and open access to enable payments in Tiki we want to add support to leverage Interledger payments. Tiki currently already has the building blocks for e-commerce and subscriptions and we planned to add support for payments using Interledger. In the vision any Tiki owner would be able to use Interledger to take payments on their websites, that process was envisioned to be the simplest possible, lowering the barrier to adoption. The approach taken was to build a library that would offer a consistent interface to request payments using multiple providers and have that library published as an asset by itself, and then integrate that library in Tiki, so that the Tiki website owner would mostly need to supply the credentials of the platform/wallet to use and the process would "just work".

Unfortunately when trying to implement this idea, we found that in the market there are primarily two ILP-enabled wallets upHold and GateHUB, and of them only GateHUB allows you to use ILP Pointers as targets for payment. Additionally, we would need an "invoice" creation interface so that different ILP Pointers could be created by invoice so we could track the settlement of an order. Neither of the above providers offer such a facility and in this area only Anypay offers the kind of interface that we would need (https://docs.anypayinc.com/invoices/create-invoice) but unfortunately they don't offer ILP yet. This clearly represents a big gap in the market and a risk/challenge for wider adoption of ILP.

This delayed progress as we needed to go back to the drawing board. Nevertheless, we still believe the concept described above is a valid one, so we are in the process of doing the following adaptations that will allow us to prove the concept and make it robust enough for anyone that wants to run their own SPSP invoice server to be able to integrate with Tiki. We will keep the concept of a library, but for now with a single back end (https://github.com/interledgerjs/ilp-spsp-invoice-server) and we will integrate that with Tiki.

This approach will require a deeper level of integration with ILP than expected, when compared with integrating with existing wallet providers, but it will be able to showcase the usage of ILP payment that we envisioned for this project. The current limitation of this approach is that, for the moment, money would only connect to the community network, not the ILP livenet.

What’s next?

Although more work remains on ILP integration, the development team is glad to be on track. We will continue to make the necessary efforts to meet our objectives. The next steps include a detailed and thorough testing of the newly implemented features with the designed prototype. The testing process will involve detailed testing of the features along with fixing any bugs that are found during the process. Once the bugs are fixed, the team will ensure seamless execution of the newly integrated features in Tiki and will implement any required improvements.

Furthermore, detailed documentation incorporating details about the latest features will be compiled to enable the Tiki community of users to leverage the advanced, efficient, and easy mechanism for online payments and website monetization. After the testing and documentation, the task to publish the details of the latest features on social media will be carried out in order to guide and illuminate both Tiki users and others around the globe.

What community support would benefit your project?

WikiSuite is a part of the global community of over 20,000 individuals invested in the creation and development of Open Source software. The team always seeks new people interested to join the Tiki community to contribute to Open Source development. The extensive community enables further enhancement and improvement of the developed features along with providing answers to users' questions. It is not possible for one developer to create a foolproof solution and eliminate all the issues or bugs in a feature or a software solution. However, if done by a community of hundreds or thousands, then each individual, having their own experiences, skills, and perspectives, can contribute to significantly improve and enhance the software solution or feature. Anyone interested is welcome to join our active community and start contributing now at https://gitlab.com/tikiwiki.