Hi Svetlana,

Thanks for your offer to help! 

We're currently working on getting the front and back end ready to begin A/B testing [1] for a new search results page. As you noted, one of those tasks is getting a labs instance up and running [2] to aid in that testing. That's one of our goals that Jan and the Discovery Search team is working on to complete by the end of this year.

I'm happy to hear that you're interested in setting up something, probably in Vagrant, to aid in your coding of a new front end search results page. Let us know your progress on that and maybe the end result can get into a testing instance on Labs for others to give feedback on. 

The tabbed interface is interesting to us, in Discovery, as a possible additional option to the new search results page. However, for our initial implementation, we'll probably go with something similar to what we will A/B test on. Of course, that's based on the data we'll collect during the A/B test and community feedback. 

All that being said, I'm glad that you're interested in learning MediaWiki and coding up a new test instance for the search results page! Good luck! :)

Cheers,

Deb


[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Cross-wiki_Search_Result_Improvements/Testing
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T151344


--
deb tankersley
irc: debt
Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 5:58 AM, Jan Drewniak <jdrewniak@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hello Svetlana

I'm a front-end developer on the search team, and although I know very little about mediawiki and how to best integrate this feature, I'd love to help as much as I can. My expertise lie mostly in the HTML/CSS/JS world. 

We're still collaborating with designers at the WMF to see how this feature can be styled, but the general concept is pretty solid (just like you have on your page). A few weeks ago I created an HTML prototype to illustrate this idea:  

https://people.wikimedia.org/~jdrewniak/SERP-tabs/

It's just a proof-of-concept with some throw-away code, but I think it gets the idea across. 

I'm in the UTC+1 timezone and jan_drewniak on #wikimedia-discovery IRC. I am available to help you as much as I can, but I'm also learning the ins & outs of mediawiki as you are.

Cheers,
Jan


On Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 12:03 PM, Guillaume Lederrey <glederrey@wikimedia.org> wrote:
It is thanksgiving weekend in some part of the world, so the usual
suspects might not be available to answer this until next Monday. I'll
put a few thoughts inline, but keep in mind that this is not really my
area of expertise.

On Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 1:50 AM, Svetlana Tkachenko
<svetlana@members.fsf.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> In response to [0] I am considering volunteering to develop the tabbed
> search interface [2] [3]. To me it looks like more logical, more
> familiar to users compared to the other interfaces.
>
> I'm Gryllida at Wikimedia sites. I have prior Perl and JavaScript
> experience interacting with the MediaWiki API [1], but none in PHP. The
> JavaScript things I wrote are rather scattered; I have only minimal
> understanding of objects and modules as I only wrote subroutine style
> scripts before. At home, I use a GNU/Linux Debian desktop.
>
> So this week I came to IRC and asked several questions to get an idea of
> what the Discovery team is doing. Thanks Deborah for sharing the current
> state of things! :-) I appear to realize that the tabbed interface is in
> the plans and nobody is working on it, so it's good to take.

Thanks a lot for proposing your help!

> We had left some questions unanswered. Particularly, is the Labs
> instance at [4] expected to be used for all ideas at once or only for
> one at a time, and is it shared between several people? Is it a good
> idea for me to use a Labs instance at initial development stages or only
> when the code is nearing completion? Or is it better to use a Vagrant
> instance locally? Or both?

You will most probably have more freedom by using Vagrant. You will be
able to break anything you want to break without impacting anyone
else. Our current instances in labs have new code deployed once that
code is already reviewed and merged (as far as I know). So for early
testing, Vagrant looks like a better solution.

You could also request labs access and start your own instance to
check your own code. But that is probably more work than just using
Vagrant.

We have some documentation about the way we use Vagrant that you might
want to read [1]. This is a long and non trivial page. Feel free to
ask for clarifications on IRC.

> What documentation and code do you recommend me to read? May I develop
> it as an extension as much as possible and not a gadget, so that people
> don't have to wait for page JavaScript to finish loading before they see
> the new sister wiki tabs?
>
> May I please ask someone to volunteer mentoring me throughout the
> project? (I am in the UTC+11 timezone at present; 'gry' nickname at
> chat.freenode.net.)

I'm probably not the right mentor (I know next to nothing about
mediawiki itself), but if you have any question related to
infrastructure / puppet / other strange things, feel free to ask!

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki-Vagrant

> Regards,
> Svetlana.
>
> [0]:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2016-November/001502.html
> [1]: http://svetlana.nfshost.com/fs/
> [2]:
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Cross-wiki_Search_Result_Improvements/Design#Tabbed_interface
> [3]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gryllida/sandbox
> [4]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T151344
>
> _______________________________________________
> discovery mailing list
> discovery@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery



--
Guillaume Lederrey
Operations Engineer, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation
UTC+1 / CET

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--
Jan Drewniak
UX Engineer, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation

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