Thank you for your support, Tharpenator.
I must say I am a great Mediawiki and SMW fan and I admire the way it
develops and the proficiency of the people behind it.
I am pretty familiar with various platforms (Wordpress, Windows 10,
Joomla, Vtiger, Silverstripe) of which Mediawiki certainly is the most
complex. My main problem is the modularity and the reaction chain caused by
some upgrades. For example: going up to SMW 2.3 and then finding that Maps
and Forms no longer work. Then upgrading Maps and Forms and notice that
this was to no avail and having to restore everything. I have about 80
extensions in my Wiki and I'm now at a level where I will have to do what
others are doing: leave things where they are and stop updating. Much to my
regret, because I'm noticing progress in several aspects which won't be
available to my users and myself.
On Sun, Dec 6, 2015 at 11:01 PM, <tharpenator(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Tyler, I agree composer is a great tool if you
can run it. And I agree
most extensions that need be installed via composer can be done without,
but how clear is that to the average Mediawiki website operator? Put
yourself in the shoes of someone who runs a Wordpress site and than also
tries to run a Mediawiki site. The learning curve is a lot higher and there
is a lot of confusion in the process. Francis, in the earlier thread, said
users like him maybe were the minority (those who don't have command
access), but the reality is over 70% of all third party users to Mediawiki
do not upgrade -- so the majority is being left behind.
Somethings will always be complex, but surely Mediawiki could be made a
little more user friendly for the vast majority of people (a principle in
alignment with the democratic drives behind the wiki community). Anyone
know an easy way to find a new extension? No, the Martix broke down two
years ago and no one has fixed it. We have wikimedia commons, that awesome
site of millions of images, that can be embedded into any Mediawiki site --
why can't here there be a special page on every wiki that shows new
extensions? Special: Version is a great page, but why can't it be more
insightful? Maybe listing extensions that need to be updated (I think
there's old out dated extension that tried to do this) and one day also
allowing for the update to happen at the push of a button.
Sent from my iPad
On Dec 6, 2015, at 12:43 PM, Tyler Romeo
<tylerromeo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Just wanna say that it's unfair to group Composer into that. I
understand the
difficult of multi-platform support (specifically throwing
node.js and other things into the mix), but Composer is just, at it's base,
a PHP file manager.
Any extension that can "only be installed with Composer", can actually
be installed without Composer. You can manually copy the extension files
into the proper location, or you can even just run Composer locally and
then upload the result. (I'm pretty sure we have a tool that gives you a
pre-packaged tarball.) It's significantly better than other PHP solutions
like PEAR.
--
Tyler Romeo
https://parent5446.nyc
0x405D34A7C86B42DF
From: Francis Franck <francis.franck(a)gmail.com>
Reply: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <
mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: December 6, 2015 at 10:23:25
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <
mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [MediaWiki-l] What PHP version do
you use? (Chris Koerner)
I fully agree with David Shaw.
I just posted the following:
Why, oh why is this environment getting so complex for users who have no
> terminal access to their server? Or am I the only one?
>
> Many extensions can only be installed via Composer. VisualEditor
requires
> Parsoid. And so on. It's made impossible
for us to stay up to date.
Maybe
> users like myself are just a minority, but it
is still a pity.
Especially
so
because up to a year ago it all seemed so promising.
Kind regards,
Francis
> On Sun, Dec 6, 2015 at 5:14 PM, David Shaw <david.shaw.x23(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> I concur with those who mention the difficulty of upgrading. I'm
running
> MW 1.26.0 in a single-click installation on
AWS.
>
> Other products I use -- including open source -- have a graceful and
> online update process.
>
> MW is built by developers for developers. I'm not a developer and every
> time I upgrade I'm scared. It's a fraught exercise.
>
> I have a few things that don't work, and I have no idea why. For
> example, file uploads stopped working somewhere along the way but I
> don't know when exactly. I didn't change file permissions; although
I've
> fiddled with them endlessly since. I suspect
it's something in the base
> AWS stack, but what? [Permissions seem to be an area of discussion with
> different falvours of Linux.]
>
> I would like to install Parsoid (why isn't it in the base install?) but
> nobody can offer insight into how to install it at docroot when you
only
> have docroot access. I hired a Linux pro to
help with that one and he
> threw his hands up. [Installation is easy, but how do you start it up
> automatically?]
>
> Why is the mobile frontend an add-on and not the default? It's 2015...
>
> Quite a few extensions have gone to a DevOps approach of continuous
> development and release, but how do I know when to update them? There
is
no online
notifiction.
All of these and more point to the legacy and Dev nature of MW.
David
> On 05/12/2015 7:00 AM, mediawiki-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> Re: What PHP version do you use? (Chris Koerner)
--
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