Tiki ILP Integration and Monetization — Final Grant Report

#grantreports

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!