Hi, I'm currently working on the Memento Extension for Mediawiki, as announced earlier today by Herbert Van de Sompel.
The goal of this extension is to work with the Memento framework, which attempts to display web pages as they appeared at a given date and time in the past. Our goal is for this to be a collaborative effort focusing on solving issues and providing functionality in "the Wikimedia Way" as much as possible. Without further ado, I have the following technical questions (I apologize in advance for the fire hose): 1. The Memento protocol has a resource called a TimeMap [1] that takes an article name and returns text formatted as application/link-format. This text contains a machine-readable list of all of the prior revisions (mementos) of this page. It is currently implemented as a SpecialPage which can be accessed like http://www.example.com/index.php/Special:TimeMap/Article_Name. Is this the best method, or is it more preferable for us to extend the Action class and add a new action to $wgActions in order to return a TimeMap from the regular page like http://www.example.com/index.php?title=Article_Name&action=gettimemap without using the SpecialPage? Is there another preferred way of solving this problem? 2. We currently make several database calls using the the select method of the Database Object. After some research, we realized that Mediawiki provides some functions that do what we need without making these database calls directly. One of these needs is to acquire the oldid and timestamp of the first revision of a page, which can be done using Title->getFirstRevision()->getId() and Title->getFirstRevision()->getTimestamp() methods. Is there a way to get the latest ID and latest timestamp? I see I can do Title->getLatestRevID() to get the latest revision ID; what is the best way to get the latest timestamp? 3. In order to create the correct headers for use with the Memento protocol, we have to generate URIs. To accomplish this, we use the $wgServer global variable (through a layer of abstraction); how do we correctly handle situations if it isn't set by the installation? Is there an alternative? Is there a better way to construct URIs? 4. We use exceptions to indicate when showErrorPage should be run; should the hooks that catch these exceptions and then run showErrorPage also return false? 5. Is there a way to get previous revisions of embedded content, like images? I tried using the ImageBeforeProduceHTML hook, but found that setting the $time parameter didn't return a previous revision of an image. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better way? 6. Are there any additional coding standards we should be following besides those on the "Manual:Coding_conventions" and "Manual:Coding Conventions - Mediawiki" pages? 7. We have two styles for serving pages back to the user: * 302-style[2], which uses a 302 redirect to tell the user's browser to go fetch the old revision of the page (e.g. http://www.example.com/index.php?title=Article&oldid=12345) * 200-style[3], which actually modifies the page content in place so that it resembles the old revision of the page Which of these styles is preferable as a default? 8. Some sites don't wish to have their past Talk/Discussion pages accessible via Memento. We have the ability to exclude namespaces (Talk, Template, Category, etc.) via configurable option. By default it excludes nothing. What namespaces should be excluded by default? Thanks in advance for any advice, assistance, further discussion, and criticism on these and other topics. Shawn M. Jones Graduate Research Assistant Department of Computer Science Old Dominion University [1] http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/rfc/ID/#Pattern6 [2] http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/rfc/ID/#Pattern1.1 [3] http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/rfc/ID/#Pattern1.2 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
