CZ technical staff is committed to improving the stability, availability,
usability and performance of Citizendium's services. Consequently, we have
started a project to move as many of the Citizendium customizations in the
standard Mediawiki software (which implements the wiki) into an extension. This
project, which is technically called refactoring, will allow us to install a
more recent version of the software. This in turn will allow us to take
advantage of many bug fixes and to install some community requested extensions
that depend on the availability of a newer version.
Last week we completed the first stage of this project. We replaced old
versions of the extensions used by the wiki, which had some CZ customizations,
with standard current versions. This upgrade allowed us to utilize a large
number of bug fixes included in the upgraded extensions. It also provided some
minor feature enhancements.
In addition, we upgraded the database software to a more recent version and
implemented a new database replication scheme. The latter will improve our
ability to restore the wiki to a recent state when hardware and software
problems cause a wiki failure.
As is common with most major upgrades, there were a few hiccups that we
encountered during the process. However, we have addressed most of these and
will continue to work on those that remain.
For the most part those using the wiki will notice few if any differences in
its interface. The upgrade focused mainly on improving stability and
availability. Nevertheless, it has laid a foundation for future work that will
improve our ability to satisfy community requests for new features (such as the
installation of new extensions) and further improvements of wiki performance
and stability.
Dan Nessett
Member of Technical Staff
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