Jack, I think this is a phenomenal idea and I'm thrilled to have access to some of wikiHow's extension inventions. :) Let me know if I can be of assistance.
Let me know if you'd like to house some of this within the Extensions WikiProject on MW.org to document the activity on a WM wiki and also make it an activity of that wikiproject. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:WikiProject_Extensions/Projects -greg aka varnent On Apr 4, 2012, at 5:33 PM, Jack Phoenix <[email protected]> wrote: > To those who don't know me yet, hi! I'm Jack Phoenix, and I've been a > MediaWiki developer since May 2008. > > One of the major third-party users of the MediaWiki software is wikiHow ( > http://www.wikihow.com/), a free how-to manual. > In my opinion, wikiHow rocks! (No, I don't work for wikiHow and I never > have.) However, wikiHow has one rather big problem. You can see it on their > Special:Version. Yep... the site's running MediaWiki 1.12 (!), which is > four years old. > In software development, four years is an eternity. However, wikiHow's > technical team is rather small and their codebase is full of custom > extensions, patches and hacks -- as a result, they don't really have time > for gigantic projects, such as upgrading the MediaWiki engine, let alone > managing an open source project. > Fortunately wikiHow publishes their source code at > http://src.wikihow.comand a new dump will be generated each Monday. > > Inspired by this, a fellow developer and a friend of mine, Lewis Cawte > (User:Lcawte) created a Google Code repository for the project. > You can see the project page at http://code.google.com/p/wikihow/ > Basically, the goal of this cleanup project is to update, fix, tweak and > patch wikiHow extensions and related things created by wikiHow and make > them work on the most recent stable release of MediaWiki (which is > currently 1.18.1). > In addition to that, the project provides a web-based viewer to see diffs > between these weekly code releases. > Upon a code release, the older source code dump is deleted from > src.wikihow.com and there's no way to see what changed between two > releases, if you don't have both source code dumps and GNU diff or some > other diffing utility available. > We hope that in time, when the project is complete, wikiHow.com can switch > to this codebase and abandon the one based on MediaWiki 1.12. > > Right now we're managing the official code releases like this: > *each Monday, when a release has been done, a new folder in tags directory > is created (http://code.google.com/p/wikihow/source/detail?r=30), > *the diff generated by "diff -ur older_release newest_release" is applied > against the newly created tag ( > http://code.google.com/p/wikihow/source/detail?r=31), > *and eventually these changes are applied against trunk as needed ( > http://code.google.com/p/wikihow/source/detail?r=39); right now this is > very easy since most extensions haven't been cleaned up, but in time this > will take more developer time, as the changes need to reviewed more > carefully > > We're inviting anyone interested in MediaWiki development, wikiHow or both > to join the project! > There's /a lot/ of things to do and right now there are only two people > working on it (me and Lewis); it's going to take a while for us to fix > everything and still something might slip by us, so we're hoping to have > more eyeballs on the code. > > The code repository is a SVN repo at > http://wikihow.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ and we're very liberal with commit > access, just ask one of us for commit rights and you'll get 'em right away! > (For those wondering why SVN and why Google Code, the answer is pretty > simple: both of us are more familiar with SVN rather than any distributed > version control system, and given that the Wikimedia Foundation is phasing > out SVN in favour of git, we didn't want to use it to host this project.) > > If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask! > > On behalf of the wikiHow codebase cleanup project, > Jack Phoenix & Lewis Cawte > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
