On 26/02/14 17:04, Jon Robson wrote:

> MobileFrontend is an arse to setup and a lot of it is either specifically coded to suit Wikipedia, or it makes assumptions, such as the skin, that are often not viable for other projects at all.

This comment greatly surprised me. MobileFrontend was previously very difficult to set up but should now be very trivial. When did you last try?

I'm not sure what you mean about assumptions and how this would effect the homepage redesign. If the redesign is designed responsively it will just work. MobileFrontend is its own skin so it's not making assumptions - it knows what skin it is running in...

Set it up sometime in 2013, been running into problems ever since, mostly with caching. As I recall we wound up having to direct mobile users to just use an app that just made sure the mobile version was called.

But it may be an issue with the documentation, then, especially this - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MobileFrontend/Configuring_browser_auto-detection

It's unclear what you mean by 'front-end caching' - what all does this cover? Is it just squid/varnish-type things, or does it include the file cache as well? Many projects do use at least that.
The example varnish configuration appears to be missing. Can this be fixed?

I don't mean that MF poses problems with the homepage, I mean these are issues for third-party users, and that the way it's listed on the homepage is very misleading because it implies it's part of core and works out of the box. (The skin-specific problems may have been fixed in the master/current, but as a general rule third-party users will not be using the current version. They'll be using something marked as stable for their mw version.)

MF may well be on its way to being good for most everyone running a wiki of similar format to wikipedia, but it ain't there yet, and that's also just MF, not MediaWiki out of the box, hence my comments.

-I